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Authors: Howard Engel

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BOOK: The Suicide Murders
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“Hello, Myrna. Good evening, Mr. Cooperman. I didn’t expect to find you here. I wondered whose car that was.” He went directly to the pine cabinet where he poured himself a double scotch with Perrier. Then he collected Myrna’s glass and refilled it expertly. “Is that gin you’re drinking, Mr. Cooperman?”

“I’m just fine, thanks,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I was just leaving.” Mrs. Yates frowned to show that she was sorry to see me go so quickly, careful not to show any surprise at Bill Ward’s sudden appearance. I turned and said good night to Myrna, and then said to Ward, “I still feel very strongly that you shouldn’t keep that business appointment you mentioned.” Ward shrugged and smiled. I wouldn’t say he looked likeable just then, but it was his least hateful pose to date. Myrna came with me to the door.

“I know what you think,” she said.

“I know you know,” I said, grinned and said good night. I dragged myself back to the hotel and to bed. I’d forgotten to ask Myrna for another cheque, but I thought that she’d be good for it. It was hard getting her voice and eyes out of my head as I tossed and turned under the covers with the neon winking at me through the half-drawn drapes. The cars outside drew crazy shadows across my walls. I was glad when sweet oblivion finally grabbed me and dragged me off.

TWENTY-FIVE

Once again, I won’t bore you with the details of my weekend. The secrets of the laundromat will die with me, as will those of the car wash and an attempt at stapling the hanging hem of my trouser cuff.

The Saturday paper was full of Core Two. Even the Toronto papers devoted generous space to this multimillion-dollar civic development. Stories told how parcels of land had been carefully assembled over the past year, forty-two separate pieces. Ward was quoted briefly and Mayor Rampham at length. Both were pictured wearing smiles and hard hats. Another blow for progress.

On the business page, I heard about the details of the financing. Elsewhere, a couple of developers who had been quietly bypassed were calling for an inquiry, and yelling “fraud.” But an Ontario cabinet minister was quoted saying that Grantham was showing the way ahead to the rest of the province. It was a big day for Grantham. It was a big day for Bill Ward. He had made the killing he’d dreamed of. He was no longer just a wealthy man as we understood wealth in this Niagara backwater. I took my hat off to him, the bastard. He’d brought it off in spite of Chester’s death, Zekerman’s interference and my snooping. I took my hat off to him.

I managed to kill a few hours on Saturday evening reading through Liz Tilford’s library. It was quite a collection for a serious-minded girl with nothing better to do on Saturday nights. Then I dug out the page of appointments that Martha had mailed me. After an hour or two, it began to get interesting.

Monday morning found me still in bed when the phone started ringing. Since few people had this number, I was confused to hear it jangling away on top of my copy of
Improving Your Chess.
I stretched out an arm from the bed and the noise stopped.

“Hello?” I could hear the pajamas in my voice.

“Cooperman?” It was Pete Staziak.

“What do you want, Pete?”

“Get your ass down here right away.” He wasn’t fooling around. He sounded like he’d been up all night, so I suppressed an instinct to tease him. At the best of times, Pete had a sense of humour like I’ll bet Harrow’s mother insists Harrow has, but there are some days when it’s best to let it lie undetected.

“What’s happened?”

“The short answer is that Bill Ward’s dead. Looks like a couple of his bimbos knocked him off. We’ve got them here telling stories that should win prizes at a national fiction award. I’d appreciate it if you’d drop in. Okay?”

“I’ll be right over.”

It took no time at all to get myself organized. My breath tasted like I’d been baby-sitting somebody else’s false teeth, and when I sneezed my sinuses smelt of mildew. I grabbed a raincoat and pulled it on as I ran down the stairs. When I got outside, I could see that I wouldn’t be needing it. It was going to be another beautiful day. The sun was already glinting on the tops of cars parked in the market square. The Regional Police office is just a block and a half from the hotel. I was standing in front of the push-button door in less than ten minutes. Well, fifteen.

I asked for Sergeant Staziak, and the man at the desk pointed the way, not that I didn’t know where it was, but the last time I’d set about finding Pete myself, I’d felt the full weight of the law descend on my shoulder. When I walked into that small metallic alcove, he was sitting there with a cigarette dangling from his thin lips. A reddish stubble on his chin caught the light coming in off the parking lot.

“Thanks, Ben. I appreciate this. Here’s what we’ve got.” He picked up a report from the blotter in front of him and began ad libbing from it. “Sunday morning, around noon, a farmer and his wife from out of the township thought they saw something suspicious on their drive home from church. Up on the escarpment, the Old Stone Road takes a sharp left in front of an abandoned quarry. They saw that the fence had been shattered, and when they stopped to investigate, they saw a car thirty feet below lying on its back. They phoned the police at, at, at,” he shifted through the report, “twelve thirty-two, and the initial report from the two investigating officers said that the body of a man was found wedged behind the wheel. So, we were called in. To make a long story short, Ward didn’t die in the crash. The coroner is certain that he was dead when the car took the fall. In fact, Ward died of carbon monoxide poisoning. We went out to the golf course and asked a few questions. Eventually, we brought in two of Ward’s bodyguards. These bodyguards, to wit Bruno Marchetti and Thomas Pacifico, have been grilling most of the night, and their stories are now so far apart that we don’t know which one to book. Ward was carrying a bundle of bucks with him, so we don’t suspect any of the usual scam. Likewise the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning are easy enough to recognize. Whoever pushed Ward over was either not on the bright side, or didn’t care much about being found out. How’m I doing?”

“Just fine. I still can’t see why you got me up, though.” Pete looked at me for a moment, and then lifted his report again. He had long ago stopped taking his cigarette out of his mouth to flick the ashes off. Even at school, I had admired the way he could blow the ash off the end without bothering to use his fingers.

“One of these bimbos says he heard you and Ward having a violent argument late last week out at his golf club. He’s trying to get us to lock you up for popping Ward, so that he and his pal can get back to weeding the fairway. Now I don’t put too much stock in what Bruno Marchetti has in his deposition, but I don’t think he made up the part about you seeing Ward like that. I’m not likely to read into his statement what he wants me to read, but I’d like to hear from you how much of this is up and up. Did you see Ward late last week?”

“I saw him Thursday night for over an hour around ten o’clock. He sent three of his boys to grab me, and they caught up to me after I’d done my best to give them the slip. If I’d known it was Ward who wanted to see me, I could have saved a lot of running.”

“You were talking generalities? The fluctuation of the dollar, the position of the French franc compared with the Deutschmark. Come on, Benny, don’t ration it.”

“We discussed the deaths of Chester Yates and Andrew Zekerman, both of whom he knew. I asked him some questions about Core Two, and about the disappearance of a girl he used to know. When we finished talking, one of his boys drove me back to my car. It was around midnight, as close as I can remember.”

“Okay. You saw him Thursday night, and maybe these are two of the three that set fire to you. You didn’t want Ward dead, neither did they. Ben, I can’t figure it.”

“How are they taking all your questions?”

“Nervous as a child bride. Only Marchetti has mentioned you.”

“Do you know when he died?”

“Yeah, as close as the Doc can put it, around twelve-thirty Sunday morning, about twelve hours before he was found. Figure that one out.”

“What are you talking about? What’s to figure? You don’t think these galoots killed Ward? Okay. Then somebody else did, unless he did it himself. He didn’t have any more reason to kill himself than you do. Overlooking the fact that he had to face waking up in the morning as William Allen Ward. Now why would these two tough guys want to pop Ward? He was their boss, and I guess he looked after them. Is it likely they got a notion to freelance? The only muscle they have listed down at the labour exchange is the kind they’ve been avoiding all their lives. The way I see it …”

I was just about to wax poetic on my private views concerning this unfortunate state of affairs when Harrow thrust his big face in the doorway.

“Well, we finally got something on you, did we, cheapie? Good for us. I just had my day made for me.” He was grinning with his stained teeth. I don’t know where you can get teeth like that.

“You not working tonight, Joe?” Pete Staziak asked. His way of saying “push off” to a fellow officer. But Harrow kept his face in the doorway until he’d smoked his current butt down to his cuticle.

“It’s not work when we get a chance to see justice done around here. Couldn’t leave it alone, could you, peeper? You knew better than the whole department. Had a little fight with Ward, and decided to even the score. So you set up this amateur-hour accident and expect us to buy it. It stinks, Cooperman, and so do you.” He left his butt, such as it was, in a Styrofoam cup, and walked away only moments before Pete slammed the door in his face.

“I’m going to slam my door on his fingers, next chance I get. I’d love to throw him an electric toaster when he’s in the shower.”

“Take it easy, Pete. I don’t chip easy.”

“To hell with you. Where does he get the idea he can stick his snout into my investigation?”

“Has he found out who killed Zekerman yet?”

“Stop it, Benny. I don’t want to feel sorry for the no-good crud.”

“Right, where were we? Yeah. I was about to tell you that I think I have this thing figured out. I
think
I have, but you’re going to have to get the story out of them, because I can’t prove a word of what I’m going to say.”

“You think you know what happened, Ben? That’s great. Let’s have it, and if it doesn’t leak all over us, we’ll have the horse collar on Harrow for sure. You want coffee?” He ducked out into the hall for a minute, and put the arm on a constable who didn’t walk with sufficient concentration to avoid Pete’s instructions. When he got back, I pulled out a fresh package of smokes and stripped it of the wrapper.

“Friday night,” I began, “I got a call late at night, ten-thirty, eleven o’clock from Ward. Wait a minute. I’m trying to keep it simple, so right away I’m telling lies. At the time I said I came back to my office, I phoned my answering service. There was a message to call Ward. Before I got to him, I had to go through two deep male voices. Ward wanted me to know that he had had a call from a woman he used to see. She disappeared from the scene a couple of months ago. Really disappeared, although nothing was reported. Ward knew that I’d been looking for her. I thought that Ward would have known more than he did about where she’d gone. Anyway, on Friday night, out of the blue, he got this call from her asking him to meet her. I warned him that such a meeting might be dangerous, but he just laughed off the suggestion. I think he met the girl and by half-past twelve Saturday night, Sunday morning he was dead, with his boys sitting on their hands parked outside not knowing a thing about it. They see nothing suspicious, and do nothing until early next morning, when they come across the body, an apparent suicide.”

“Another apparent suicide. We’re collecting a matched set.” Pete intercepted the fresh-face constable with the coffee, and handed me a warm Styrofoam cup. “I used to try to drink tea out of these things, but the lemon melts the plastic and wets my trousers. Cheers.” I pried the cap off my cup and looked for a place to drop it. I followed Pete’s lead, and left it on his desk where they became emergency ashtrays.

“Picture the boys sitting it out. Their boss has told them to expect him by a certain time. That time has passed, and when they start looking, they find trouble. Trouble in that their boss was dead, trouble that he’d killed himself, and trouble about where he’d done the job. So the boys, as a parting gesture, decide that they can improve things. One of them drives Ward’s car, and the other follows. They both know the lay of the land up on the escarpment like their tongues know the sockets where their molars used to be. With any luck, they hope that the car will catch fire. So then they go back to the golf club and that’s where you picked them up. The question now is where did Ward take the girl and where did she go. I suspect it was the Bellevue Terrace house, where I was picked up last week. Savas knows all about that. It has an attached garage with a connecting door to the kitchen. Let’s say she tells Ward something that hits him so hard, he want to end it all. She leaves and he does himself in in the garage. Neat? Or try this on. She gives Ward a needle of some kind, something to knock him out, and leaves him in the car with the motor running. She goes out the back way, leaving the bodyguards watching an empty house and putting in time while their boss is sucking in the fumes. Either way, the boys think they’re improving things by sending the car into the quarry. Why don’t you try that on your two friends?”

“They’re hard nuts to crack.”

“They may feel differently about it if they think that it’s a murder they’re implicated in and not just a suicide. Trying to make the boss’s suicide look like an accident’s one thing, dressing up a murder is serious business with very nasty long numbers on conviction.”

TWENTY-SIX

The sun was unusually brilliant; the spring, which had arrived such a few short days ago, had settled in and made itself at home. The few trees downtown were fattening at the end of their twigs. Soon there would be buds and leaves. The tulips I’d noticed in front of City Hall had blossomed into red and yellow blooms. They’d had help, but there were a few other green stems by the court house, weeds to be sure, but I’m generous by nature. Green is green until August in my book. Then it’s every man for himself.

I went around to the United to pick up some lunch. For once, I picked up the menu and read through the businessman’s lunch. A couple of things looked tempting, but the waitress got to me half a minute too soon and I funked, ordering a chopped egg sandwich on white toast. Today I took an order of coleslaw on the side, and felt immediately better for ordering it. Breaking fresh paths is a heady experience.

I climbed the stairs to my office. I must be getting old; the experience of getting to the top and seeing my name on the glass doesn’t hold for me what it once held. There’s been a fading away of the lustre, just as the gold-leaf lettering was beginning to flake.

Once inside my door, I did something I’d intended to do a few days ago. I’d been thinking about what Mrs. Kline, the head nurse, had told me. I reached for the telephone book, and looked up Mrs. L.M. Blake on Dover Road. The odd piece I’d been holding now slipped into place. The laundry ticket I’d picked up in Liz Tilford’s room at Martha Tracy’s house, bore an address on Dover Road. So, that was it. Elizabeth Tilford, also known as Hilda Blake, had disappeared where a hot-shot detective would never have thought of looking for her. She’d gone home. The listing was under her mother’s name, so her father had died and she hadn’t remarried.

I drove out Queenston Road, a curving extension of St. Andrew Street. It held the bank above the old canal for about a mile, then cut out toward Niagara, as soon as the canal took a bend to the south. Wherever a street joined Queenston Road, in this early section, I could glimpse a vista of grim broken promises. The canal had held out party favours and presents to the men who sunk their capital in setting up mills along the hydraulic races, fast running channels of water which would drive millstones, operate saws, churn butter, or power fifty looms whenever the water dropped to the level of the next canal lock in the series. But now the party was over. Most of the buildings stood derelict—some looked stunned—with broken panes of glass in the rotting window-frames, boarded-up doors, buildings that had once dominated the horizon with towers and the hum of industry.

The road curved along the edge of the old canal now, climbing with it the gentlest face the escarpment presents on the Niagara Peninsula. At the top of the hill Papertown sends out a few streets of welcome. One of them, curving along the top of the escarpment, is the Dover Road. From the backyards along its length, you can see the purple office towers of Toronto and the CN Tower in front of them. But the Dover Road is also the location of the huge green water tower, itself the focus of attention from down on the lake-shore plain.

I checked the number. The house I was looking for was constructed of modest gray brick with a roof with a gentle slope to it. There were curtains in the front windows, and in the back, a low shed. The green tower stood a lot or two away, with the gigantic structure blocking out only the least pleasing view to the lake. It was a small property, in need of some repair to the shutters and the cracked cement of the front walk, but I could think of worse places to spend my declining years.

I knocked on the front door. I could hear an immediate response from inside, probably from the front room, but the door wasn’t answered for nearly a minute. When the door opened, and then only seven or eight inches, the woman with frightened green eyes asked me to name my business.

“Mrs. Blake,” I was guessing, “I’d like to speak to Hilda, if I may. Is she here?” I gave her the best of the Cooperman smile, and let the sunlight catch all my dimples.

“What made you think you’d find her here?” She wasn’t openly unhelpful. She was being unhelpful in a helpful-seeming way. I smiled again.

“I think you’ll find that she’s expecting me. The name is Cooperman. Ben Cooperman.”

“Why don’t you leave the girl alone?” the old woman asked. She was solid and short, with gray hair going a little yellow in its tight curls. She wore an apron over a flowered dress. A brooch, in the shape of a thistle, sparkled on the neat lapel of her collar. “Haven’t we suffered enough?”

“I wish I could answer that, Mrs. Blake. I don’t know all the answers. I hope that Hilda might help me to find some. I need her help, Mrs. Blake.” She looked at me, made what appeared to be half a pout, and then stood back from the door allowing me to pass her stout figure.

The room was full of caged birds of all colours. I counted at least twenty cages, some suspended from ornamental stands, and others set on tables and suspended from wires. The birds were the usual birds, with the usual bright colours that caged birds run to. There were blues and greens and yellows, an occasional glimpse of red, black, pink, and even white. There wasn’t a song bird in the lot. Not a cheerful note in over fifty little feathered breasts. The space in the room not devoted to livestock was taken by a couple of comfortable chairs and an overstuffed sofa with a picture above it of cheerful song birds. On the mantelpiece of an imitation fireplace stood two Dresden birds in china, on each side of a group of stuffed cardinals in a bell jar. It was the sort of living-room that had probably never seen a barrel of Kentucky-fried chicken.

“You’re admiring my birds,” she said. It wasn’t a question. I nodded a lie. “I have more than fifteen different varieties, not all here in the living-room, of course. That black one with the short bright beak is a minah bird, of the eastern passerine type. Some of them can be made to talk, but I don’t hold with teaching animals to do tricks. Some people see no harm in it, but I find it disgusting and degrading. It degrades both the animal and the teacher, if you want my opinion.” I stopped trying to feign interest in her exotic birds, hoping that she might come down and perch somewhere close to my reason for being here. She stopped leading me from cage to cage and said, “You really have to see her, Mr.…? I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Cooperman. Ben Cooperman. If you could tell her I’m here. I think you’ll find that in a way she has been expecting me.”

“Well, if you say that she knows you’re coming, I guess that will be all right. I hate to see her upset. She’s been so brave since she came back home.”

“Brave? In what way?” I guess I turned on her a little more directly than I’d intended. She blinked her eyes a couple of times before trying to answer.

“We’ve had a lot of grief in this family off and on, Mr. Cooperman, and Hilda has kept her little head held high right through the worst of it. At times things looked black for the whole family, but Hilda kept us going, like a little jenny wren fighting off a bluejay. Who would have thought that the cost would be so high? And how I missed her when they’d all gone. First Elizabeth, then Morris, that was my husband—the shock of Elizabeth’s death killed the lamb in less than a year. Then Hilda became sick, but how she fought back. I was very nearly distracted myself, I’m telling you. If it wasn’t for my little friends here, I should have miscarried in my head, I’m sure.” She paused, and looked over my shoulder, as though she could see through the wall at my back. “She’s out in the garden, Mr.… There! I’ve forgotten it again. I’m getting on in years, and my memory isn’t what it was. I used to be able to remember all of ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ by Mr. Longfellow, the poet. Nowadays I can’t remember my own name, so please don’t take offence.” She led me through the house, our way lined by more bird cages, to the kitchen. Through the window I could see her, seated in a lawn chair, looking out over the view from the heights.

BOOK: The Suicide Murders
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