The Suicide Murders (6 page)

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 background. 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 of 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 …”

“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 attention— 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.