The Suicide Murders (8 page)

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.”

“Looks that way. We are trying to get some help from Medicare to help us find out who his patients were yesterday, but they are reading us a lot of stuff about confidentiality and like that. They are very sensitive about that kind of thing. We got lots of his files here, but it sounds like they all could have done him in. He was seeing some weird people, Benny.”

“Is that all you’ve got?”

“You complaining? If you weren’t a private eye, you’d have to go out and get a job.”

“I never thought I’d hear that from a cop.”

“Hey, there is one funny thing we found out about your good dead friend the doctor: he was cooking the Medicare accounts.”

“How can you tell?”

“Interesting, huh? Well, we took what was left of his office downtown and looked at it most of this afternoon. We found a few bill which didn’t quite tally with the jottings about appointments. He was charging everybody we could match up with about three or four visits a month more than they actually made. No skin of the customers’ noses, because in the end they collected from Medicare. Nice fellow, eh?”

“Maybe he was killed by a bunch of hit boys from the Medical Association for giving them a bad name?”

“I’ll tell Harrow you suggested it.”

“Don’t spoil my supper. So long. I’ll be talking to you.”

“Don’t rush. Goodbye.” Pete was a good guy most of the time. But he was a sucker for a queen’s side opening.

I called Martha back. I never really believe that receptionists pass out messages as liberally as they are paid to do. And with someone like Martha Tracy, I wouldn’t be surprised to find people holding out on her in little ways. I was right. She was at her desk.

“Martha?”

“Who wants her?”

“Cooperman.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place. I just got back from drinking my lunch. Has something happened?”

“Nothing you haven’t read about. But I wanted to ask you about a girl who used to work in your office: Elizabeth Tilford. Does that name ring a bell?”

“I only wish they’d stop. Sure I remember her. I put her up after she came to work for us. She stayed six months and left owing me two months’ rent. I can scarcely manage the mortgage as it is, and she leaves like that without a word.”

“Exactly when did she come to work at the office?” I could hear the loud sounds of finger arithmetic for a few seconds.

“I think she started around the end of July last year. She moved in with me a month after that. I had the back room empty anyway, and I thought the company might be cheerful.”

“When did you see her last?”

“I told you, two months ago. End of February.”

“I hear she was good-looking.”

“What do you expect me to say? She had all the right equipment in just the right proportions. Red hair, long legs, smart but cold. Not what you call a good mixer. Not one to go off in a romantic fog and marry the third assistant to the boss in the mailroom. She was after big game.”

“You mean Ward?”

“For a little guy, you get around, don’t you? Yeah, she picked out her man the first time she set eyes on him, and she didn’t want a second or third string to fall back on. They were a hot number for a couple of months. She played him smart, like a trout fisherman. He never saw her drool once; he thought it was all his idea. That kind of smart.

“And it went on until she left?”

“M’yeah. Without a word to anybody. At first we thought she’d been fired. I remember that Mr. Yates spent part of a day talking to her in her office. That was the last day or near it. I thought she’d come out with a pink slip and a letter of recommendation. That’s the way Mr. Yates did things.”

“You’re serious about her disappearing? I mean, she didn’t just vanish, did she? Somebody must know where she went. Ward for instance.”

“Ask him if you dare.”

“I may have to do that. But I can’t get over this business of her lamming out of there without anybody raising a fuss. She owed you money …”

“I’m just soft in the head, trusting people. I should be put away.”

“Didn’t anybody get in touch with the police about it?”

“Well, Mr. Ward wouldn’t have been the one to call them in. Chester asked me if I thought that we should report her as a missing person, but, hell, she didn’t seem to me to be the sort of girl that got herself raped or murdered. The other way round maybe. I thought more than likely she’d just gone off somewhere. She didn’t leave much behind her. Not many clothes, no furniture, just a few books. And if you dragged me to court, I’d have to admit that even the back rent wouldn’t add up to much in real money. Still, she could have said goodbye.”

“What was she like?”

“When she wasn’t out with Mr. Ward, she stayed home reading. She didn’t have much fun, didn’t like jawing like I do, or drinking, like I do, or even watching TV. She didn’t even smoke. She was too serious for me. I don’t know what Mr. Ward saw in her, apart from the obvious. Chester liked her too. She played up to him, and he licked it up like cream.”

“Martha, you don’t miss much. Be talking to you. Goodbye.”

“Cooperman, come back here! What’s she got to do with all this?”

“If I find out, Martha, you’ll be the first to know.”

TWELVE

I locked up the shop early. It was the first night in quite a few that I wouldn’t be burning the midnight oil. With spring in the air, I wasn’t anxious to hang around pretending I had honest work to do. Tomorrow, or one of these days, I’d have to finish my income tax. It was a month late, but as I tried to explain to the authorities in a letter, the tax must wait upon the income, not the other way around. With the longer days and warmer nights, I could see the divorce business beginning to flock in. I never liked standing under windows in the winter. People who get separated in the winter deserve to stay married. I remember once I was following this guy who took his girlfriend out for a boatride down at Port Richmond. He spent the whole day out there with her, just gliding under the low-hanging willows. They ate their lunch out of a wicker hamper. It was almost like he was treating me to a day off. Even though I didn’t have a hamper, I’d been sharp enough to realize that I might need something to eat, so I was carrying a sandwich with me just in case. The lettuce and celery were wilted, but the egg was fresh. Next time, I promised myself to have travelling sandwiches toasted. They don’t get as soggy.

Frank Bushmill’s light was still on, but I wasn’t much in the mood to talk to him. He saw me leaving though, and pulled me into his dank office for “a drap of the creature.” He knew I didn’t drink much, but he seemed unable to talk about anything but feet without a glass in his hand.

“How are you and the Russians getting along?”

“Too busy to do any reading, Frank.”

“Too busy to live, then. Here’s a book now.
The Third Policeman
, Flann O’Brien.”

“I don’t read mysteries,” I lied.

“Read this. You won’t regret it. That’s an autographed copy, I want it back.”

“You can have it right away. I never finish books these days. I keep dozing off.” I should have seen luck when it was looking at me. Here was a chance to get away with only a book.

“Read it.”

“I will. I’ll start on it at once. Good night.”

For Frank’s sake I honestly tried, but I couldn’t get the hang of it at all and I gave up about page twelve.

Wednesday dawned bright and fresh. Or I guess it did. I slept away until eight, got up, showered and shaved, and went out to get my breakfast at a restaurant near the hotel called “Bagels.” They have rolls of all kinds, muffins, rye bread both light and dark, but never,
never
bagels. They just ran out, they didn’t come in today, they didn’t come in yet. For other people there were bagels, but not for me. I tried not to think of it as a conspiracy.

“Morning, Sid. I’ll have lox and cream cheese on a bagel.”

“Have to be on rye or kaiser roll. I’m out of bagels.”

“Maybe you’re not ordering enough.” He looked at me like I said his wife was fooling around with the bus-boy.

“If I got more bagels, I would have left-over bagels. Nobody likes to eat left-over bagels. Nightmares you are trying to give me, Benny.”

I opened up my office door on the sun stealing across my desk drying up the water in the plant I was trying to grow. I moved it to the shade again and pulled the blinds, which made it necessary to turn on the lights. Already I could see it was going to be one of those days. I said a silent prayer, hoping that it might help to get the season’s divorces started. Once the weather brightens up and the hockey disappears from television, a lot of people take up divorce. And I had a whole filing cabinet to accommodate their business.

I jumped to a wrong conclusion. Any day that begins with mail can’t be all bad. The first envelope contained a cheque for two hundred dollars signed by Myrna Yates. The second envelope contained the list of appointments that Martha had sent me from two blocks away three days ago. With a push it could have found me by itself in that time. It was a lined piece of foolscap with jottings in black Pentel. I decided to try the third envelope to see if I’d won the Provincial lottery.

The third envelope was a stiff one with Dr. Zekerman’s name and office address in the upper left-hand corner. It gave me the blue devils opening communications from the grave, or at least the morgue, so I tore it open with more than my usual number of thumbs. From inside tumbled out onto my desk a photograph, three pages of notes, nearly indecipherable, and a folded photo copy of a newspaper clipping.

The photograph was a small album-sized snapshot, a bit chewed around the corners. It showed two smiling girls looking out at me. They were dressed alike in Scottish kilts and hats, the younger one sitting and the older one standing a little behind her chair. To my inexperienced eye, they looked like sisters. The older girl looked about twelve, and her sister about ten. To me, a complete stranger, they looked like nice girls; their foreheads were large, their hair light, but not blonde, and their faces were round and open. Nothing was written on the back of the picture. Nor did the good doctor bother to scrawl a note to me. After all, he could explain everything next time I ran into him.

The photocopied clipping was from the
Beacon
, dated the twenty-eight of February, 1964. It read:

And so on. Was the dead girl one of the sisters in the photograph? Or was it a picture of the fellow student, Susan Weiss? Not likely. The Weisses aren’t big on kilts. How am I doing, Dr. Z?

So, we have both sisters in the picture. But which is which? Most likely the older one went off to school first. Yeah, and the younger was still living at home when the older girl dies. I couldn’t carry water very far in a deduction, like that, so I didn’t try.

Next I looked at the three pages. My second glance found them as hard to read as my first. They were torn from a lined stenographer’s pad, and the pencil scratchings were all in the same difficult handwriting that had addressed the package to me. He might as well have sent me a rag, a bone and hank of hair. I looked harder at the jottings. I wasn’t making it up. They were next door to hen tracks. I thought that I might try taking them around to Lou Gelner. As a doctor, he is something of an authority on bad handwriting. And, to be fair, these notes looked as though they were some kind of professional shorthand, such as the doctor might have scribbled during a therapy session, or just afterwards.

Well, thank you, Dr. Z, you were trying hard to tell me something. It’s not your fault that I can’t lip-read in the fog. Send me another hint, please.

I turned back to Martha’s find after putting the photograph and clipping in my breast pocket. It was just a list of names, names like Jones, Peters, Evans and others each with a time beside it.

There was no continuing time sequence like a desk calendar has. Here the times were all over the place jumping from an hour in the middle of the morning to one after office hours, and then going earlier in the day again before the first appointment. Some of the appointments were made for the small hours of the morning. Chester was beginning to look like a workaholic. All work and no play, Chester, you should have known that. Yet, come to think of it, his wife hadn’t complained to me of his meetings in the middle of the night. That would have put me on the payroll a lot earlier, if he had been jumping out of bed in the middle of the night “to see a man about some shares.” Not bloody likely.

I looked at the names again: Jones, Henry, Bill, Peters, Careless, Harney, Evans, York, Henderson, Evans, Peters, Richards, Dodge, Plymouth, Ford, Williams and Roberts. I was beginning to think that there was less here than meets the eye. The name Bill I recognized right away: Bill Ward. But there are lots of Bills in the world. Call out
Bill
in the Men’s Beverage Room, and half the place will get up. But it was the only name on the list that was clearly a first name. That made my guess that it was Ward look a little better. There were a couple of repeating names: Peters and Evans. I couldn’t make anything out of that. So I moved on. Three of the names are names of cars: Dodge, Plymouth and Ford. What could I do with a hot clue like that? So I did the logical thing, I put it down and promised that I would figure it out later on. There had to be some way of explaining these meetings that went all around the clock.

I thought about calling my mother. I hadn’t been in touch since Friday. A glance at my watch told me that it was still too early to call. I could usually count on her to be up at the crack of noon in the middle of the week, so I decided to give her another couple of hours. She had a birthday coming up next month. I made a note on my calendar. I dreaded the recurring round of trying to find out what she wanted. If I asked her directly, she would only tell me that all she wanted was to see me settled and happy. I didn’t think I could deliver on that this year. Birthdays were contests that Ma and Pa waged against me with seriousness and energy. There was only one absolutely just right present in a sea of thousands of imitations, and without a hint or a clue I had to pick out the right thing. It would have been easier if she was someone who could appreciate a really good cigar.