by Howard Engel
“I get all the bad news I want on TV. I don’t need it in the paper too.” I took that as permission to open it myself. In the first section, there was a short editorial about Chester running twenty lines after a long piece on the abuse of higher education by taxi drivers who are actually Ph.D.s in sociology. Writing about Chester the editorial writer mused on the pressure of modern life, the loneliness of the men at the top, and the loss of our ablest citizens because they are always willing to walk the extra mile. For a minute it looked as though he was going to throw in a blast at food additives, but at the last moment he swerved off in another direction. Food additives came in for a column on their own further down the page. On the inside of the back page under Deaths, Marriages, Funerals and In Memoriam I discovered that the Yates funeral was slated for Monday. The coroner hadn’t seen fit to hold Chester’s body while the investigation continued. I was still way out in front in a field of one.
In about twenty minutes, my mother called us to the table. The Friday night candles had been lit, and there were two bowls of soup on the plastic cloth, one for me and the other for my father. It was canned vegetable.
“Where’s your soup?” my father asked.
“I never eat soup,” she answered. I was still in short pants when I first heard that exchange. “If anyone wants a salad, I can make one,” she dared us. I said that a salad would be just the thing. She didn’t budge. Pa went into the kitchen to retrieve the steaks from the broiler. “Manny, let Benny have the rare one.” He placed the platter of steaming meat in the middle of the table, after I cleared a place. “You know how he likes his rare.” He handed me my plate and I cut into the meat. It was liver gray all the way through. The vegetables were canned peas and carrots; lukewarm. Ma repeated her invitation to salad. Maybe there remained in the back of her mind the ghost of a servant lurking in the kitchen who could whip up these trifles at a moment’s notice. The meal concluded with the traditional passing of the teabag from cup to cup, followed by the time-honoured squirt from the plastic lemon. After his last sip of tea, Pa pushed himself away from the table observing, “Benny, it does you good to get a home-cooked meal for a change, after the chazerai you eat in restaurants.”
Later, back at my office, I did a few useful chores. I attached the key I’d taken from Martha Tracy’s desk to a piece of paper with Scotch tape, slipped it into a stamped envelope, addressed the envelope to Martha Tracy care of her office in the Caddell Building on James Street and put it with my out mail. Then I tried to reach Dr. Zekerman again. No luck. I left my name for a second time with his answering service. Then I lit a cigarette and dialled the number Myrna Yates had given me.
“Hello?”
“Mrs. Yates, this is Benny Cooperman.” There was the sound of some sort of mental process down at her end of the wire.
“Oh yes, Mr. Cooperman.” Her voice became metallic and formal.
“I just wanted to tell you how sorry I was to hear about what happened to your husband.” I was trying to find a way to tell her what I’d found out without saying too much over the phone. “I wonder if we might meet to discuss some business—after Monday, of course.” That was the best I could manage.
“Mr. Cooperman, I don’t think we have any business to discuss. I thank you for what you’ve done, and I’m sure you understand that there is nothing further …” At this point another voice, on an extension somewhere, joined in with an authority familiar with the forms and arts of chilling a poor private investigator to the marrow.
“Look here, Mr. Cooperman, I don’t know what business you are talking about, but Mrs. Yates is in no condition to discuss business at a time like this. I’m sure you appreciate the severity of the shock she’s had and I don’t think that I want to see her suffer any more if I can help it. Do I make myself clear?”
“Bill, I …”
“Let me handle this, Myrna. I think that Mr. Cooper-man understands the situation.”
“My business,” I began to say, “is with Mrs. Yates, Mr.…?”
“This is William Allen Ward, Mr. Cooperman, and I think I’ve made it plain that Mrs. Yates doesn’t wish to be harassed by people just now. I don’t wish to sound unpleasant, but if you don’t get off the line, I will be forced to report this unfeeling and distress-causing behaviour. Do we understand each other?”
“Sure, Mr. Ward. Have it your way. But since when is a single phone call ‘harassment’? I’ll bet Mrs. Yates could tell me to hang up all by herself if she wanted to.”
“It seems to me I did just that, Mr. Cooperman,” she added, filling an inside straight that I’d left wide open to her.
“Okay, okay. I’m hanging up. Sorry to have caused all the commotion.”
So Myrna Yates had William Allen Ward running interference for her. I guess the mayor could spare him for a few hours in such a good cause. Ward was a comer in local politics, the mayor’s shadow, and the man responsible for adding the Harvard Business School phrases to the most recent crop of official documents. A local boy, he had brushed the hay and alfalfa off his jeans and made good in a way that looked like it was going to pull the whole city into the big time behind him. Even the mayor looked like a cracker-barrel hick when sitting next to Bill Ward on a public platform. I was impressed by Myrna
Yates’ taste in protectors. She couldn’t have picked better.
Next, I thought I’d try Martha Tracy. I dialled her home number. Bill Ward couldn’t be in two places at once. I was getting smart in my old age.
“M’yeah?”
“Martha Tracy?”
“That’s the name. Who wants her?” It was the husky voice of an original. I could picture her at her desk shooing away unlikely visitors from Chester Yates’ door.
“This is Benny Cooperman. I’m a private investigator.”
“Come off it, who is this?”
“No, really. I want to talk to you about something concerning Mr. Yates’ death. Can I come over to see you?”
“I got a house full of people here.”
“Tomorrow, then?”
“M’yeah. But not before noon. And it better be good. I’ve had my craw full of policemen the last few days. What was the name again?”
“Cooperman. Benny Cooperman. See you at noon, tomorrow.”
“Goodbye.” And she hung up. Martha Tracy was going to be someone I wouldn’t like to miss. She sounded as shaken by the death of her boss as the security man, less. Chester must have been a wonder to work for.
I locked up the office and started for the stairs. Frank Bushmill’s light was burning, so I wandered in. The Doc was sprawled in his waiting room, dead to the world. An empty bottle had rolled from where he’d dropped it across the worn carpet to the opposite side of the room. His mouth was open and he was blowing soft bubbles at the glass globe supported by three brass chains above his head. I found a coat on the chipped walnut rack and threw it across the body. He mumbled something unintelligible, which I agreed with, naturally, and then I left him there. He didn’t have patients on Saturday morning, so he wouldn’t be awakened by an emergency case of athlete’s foot at the crack of dawn.
Back at the hotel, it was the usual Friday night din. The beat from the band hammered at the floor like an electric vibrator. Somehow the melodic line was lost in transmission through the joists and plaster, just the amplified bass notes tickled my toes out of my socks like magic fingers in cheap motels. I climbed out of my clothes and into bed. I tried to sleep but got tangled in the loose ends of the bed sheets. I hate loose ends.
SIX
Saturday dawned a hot one. But these old brick walls kept the heat away from me until I hit the street around ten. After some coffee and toast at the United, I went back to the office. The Saturday crowd on St. Andrew Street must have been laid off. Three or four merchants stood at their doorways, wondering what had hit them. Somebody should tell them their former customers are out at the shopping plazas. Out there, the storeowners have customers knee-deep and wall to wall.
The sun cut a diamond-shaped patch through the transom, throwing the reversed letters of Frank Bushmill’s name across the stairs as I climbed to my floor. No mail on a Saturday. That meant less garbage. I tried reading an itch at the back of my knees. It seemed to say get in touch with Dr. Zekerman at home. He wasn’t listed in the phone book, so I turned to the city directory. No help there either. He must have a place out in the township someplace. I phoned Lou Gelner and he looked him up in the medical registry, complaining that he was doing all my work for me, which was true. He found that Zekerman lived out along the Eleven Mile Creek by Power Gorge. I thought that I might run out there after I went to see Martha Tracy.
The western part of the city is cut off from the rest of it by a canal to the north, dirty and full of nasty concoctions brewed in the papermills a few miles up the valley; and to the west by the river-sized stream called the Eleven Mile Creek. Except for the mansion of the chief mover and entrepreneur of the canal, built in the 1840s, this side of town has nothing to shout about. Most of the houses stand on small lots on narrow streets named after dead British colonial bigwigs. They are frame bungalows mostly with a few brick veneer specimens from time to time, and a sprinkling of pebble-dashed stucco. The coming of diesel did little to lift the grime of a century of coal-dust in the backyards along the right of way of the Hamilton-Buffalo line. Each of the houses presents either faded blinds or curtains to the outsider and all of them offer a generous veranda or porch to the inaccurate aim of the Beacon delivery boy.
Martha Tracy’s house backed on the tracks, but put up a brave front in the form of a well-cropped privet hedge along the walk. It was stucco, with black and white pebble dash, and had a green-painted wooden porch. The second step needed fixing. My knock rattled the screen door, so I tried to get at the inside door, but it was fastened with a hook. I rattled it again. Soon I could hear footsteps approaching. The doors opened and I was looking at a woman of fifty, stocky, blonde and with a Churchillian chin.
“You Cooperman?” she said. I nodded. She unhooked the door and invited me down the dim hall, past glimpses of an unmade bed through a doorway on my right to the bright kitchen. “I’ve got coffee, if you don’t mind instant,” she said and found two mugs inverted on the drainboard.
“I want you to know that I’m not from the police.”
“I’ve had a belly-full of them, I’ll tell you,” she said, raising her eyebrow significantly. “I don’t know how so many people can ask the same dumb questions so many times.” I hoped that my questions were better. Of course they were. I didn’t get them out of a book.
“Well, I hope that these questions won’t take up too much of your time.”
“Time. Heck, I’ve got nothing but time. There’s no job to do until they decide what they’re going to do with me, so I’ll be on sick leave for a week anyway. And it was a shock, you know. I’d been with him for more than five years. They always say, ‘Ask Martha. She knows where all the bodies are buried.’”
“And do you?”
“Well, that’s forthright! You’re doing fine. Maybe, to save you time I should tell you that I was the last person to see Mr. Yates alive. I left at five to five. It had been a scorcher and everybody took off when I yelled ‘Quittin’ time.’ I always yell that; it’s an office joke. But usually it’s closer to five.”
“Was he alone when you left?”
“M’yeah.”
“Was his bar open? Did he have a drink going?”
“You know Chester pretty well, don’t you? Right, he often had a drink on the way by five, but that day, Thursday, he had been out most of the afternoon, and only got back to the office at quittin’ time so he shot himself with an unclouded brain, if that’s what your little head is thinking.”
“When the police got through with their investigation, did you notice anything missing from the office?”
“You should get points off for hinting to the witness. There was a bar towel gone.”
“Anything else?”
“That’s all. Do I get a free trip to Los Angeles if I hit the right answer? It should be easy: I outfitted that bar myself, got the set of eight glasses from Birks, kept the bar stocked …”
“… and the books dusted?” She grinned at me a lopsided friendly grin that was half shrug.
“As far as you know, he hadn’t planned to meet anyone after five?”
“Search me. He sometimes did, but he never told me half of what was going on.”
“Speaking of knowing what was going on, did you ever hear him say anything about ‘C2’?”
“‘C2’? What’s that?”
“I think it was something on his mind. He doodled a ‘C’ with a two and I wondered whether it meant anything to you. It doesn’t click?” She shook her head.
“Nope,” she said.
“As you know, the police are calling Mr. Yates’ death a suicide. Did you think that he was at the edge? Was he all that depressed as the papers are saying?”
“That’s leading the witness again. You should learn the rules. But no. Between me and you and the gatepost, Chester wasn’t depressed enough to kill himself. He had had a lot of business worries during recent weeks, but that man loved living too much to go and shoot himself. He was in a corner of some kind, but he was more the type to worm his way out of it, or change the rules, or something, than to take the way out he took. I thought I knew him pretty well, but that just shows to go you, doesn’t it?”
“Ms. Tracy …”
“Call me Miss Tracy. I’m a Miss not a Ms. I’m not one of those women’s libbers.”
“Miss Tracy, then, I want to thank you for being so helpful.”
“You’re breaking my heart. I told you I haven’t anything else to do, except try to find a hat to wear to the funeral on Monday. I used to have one around here someplace. Oh, well. Now, before you get on your high horse and hightail it out of here, what’s all of this in aid of? Who are you working for? You beating the bushes for Bill Ward?”
“Why do you think I might be working for him?”
“William Allen Ward moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.”
“And …?”
“Well, I’ve never seen him ask any questions, so I always guessed that he had other people collecting answers for him. He’s organized that way, if you know what I mean.” I had finished my coffee and had memorized the view of her long rectangle of backyard visible through the kitchen window. We both got up and she walked me to the front door. “You think that there’s something that’s not kosher about Chester’s suicide, Mr. Cooperman, if you’ll pardon the expression?”
“Miss Tracy, I don’t know.” I shifted my weight and held the screen door open.
“Somebody did the bugger in, eh? Well, it figures. It could make very good sense, Mr. Cooperman. Goodbye, and let me know how you make out.”
“I will,” I shouted over my shoulder as I went down the walk to my Olds at the curb.
I drove across the CN tracks on a rickety wooden bridge and kept on past more stucco fronts and kids playing jacks and marbles in the sunshine out Pelham Road. Beyond the rooftops, the ridge of the escarpment hogged the horizon, with the green water tower on the edge commanding the best view of the city below. The creek valley followed me out on my left. Gradually the curbing came to an end, the houses gave way to deserted farms and acre upon acre of former vineyards, all cultivating real estate signs. Occasionally, the stream below curved, and I could catch the glint of it in the sun. After a couple of miles of this, I could see the ten blue pipes running down the scarp to the creek. It was a domesticated
Niagara Falls, where nearly the same amount of water fell nearly as many feet as the famous cataract, but encased in steel, so it was a wash-out as a tourist attraction. Nobody was interested in falling water as long as it was in pipes.
Zekerman had his name stencilled on his mailbox in such good taste I nearly drove by his gate. It was a big, rambling house, what they still call “ranch style” in the area
even if it rises to two floors. There were three cars in the carport, which was an extension of the line of the green roof. I drove up his lane and blocked at least two of the cars from getting out. There was an Audi and two Mercedes-Benzs.
I got out of the car, stretched my back muscles and walked up to the aluminum screen door. A red-faced woman with tortured red hair answered the bell, and told me that the doctor was down at the potting shed by the creek or in the shed behind the house. I thanked her and walked around the left side of the house, past half a dozen green garbage bags stuffed with the outlines of cans and cartons, and a sick-looking Irish wolfhound with swollen joints in his legs. He gave me a quarter-hearted wag of his tail, then went back to his worries. By now I could hear Zekerman, or somebody, making a racket in the aluminum-sided shed. In the gloom at the far end, he was bashing a piece of machinery on a workbench.
“Dr. Zekerman?” I said as I came up behind him.
Zekerman filled a tall track suit with a college letter on it without letting middle age spill through the middle. He was balding the same as I was only I was doing it more neatly. He had let his remaining hair grow into long ringlets of protest against the unfairness of his genes. His foxy nose was sweaty, as was his brow. His eyes hid behind fashionable lenses that he had paid a bundle for. The face, concentrated now, looked ungenerous, unyielding, as though the cords which pulled down the corners of his mouth would never relax, and the lines which scored his face had disappeared over the edge of stubbled chin into those of his neck knew something far more serious than any good news you might tell him.
“Blasted sump pump gave out. I think it’s this valve, but I’m not sure.” He was looking suspiciously at the thing which seemed to have outlets and intakes all over it. He looked up at my face. I frowned encouragingly. “You know anything about this make?” he asked, and I denied it in a way that suggested even to me that I knew all other makes on the market. “I bled it for an hour, but it didn’t do any good.” I tried to deal with a picture in my mind of the doctor treating his sump pump to a jar full of leeches. I could see I was going to be a big help. “Hold this.” He thrust a flashlight at me and indicated that I was to shine it up the hole his screwdriver had disappeared down. I stood that way for three minutes or more, while he clanked about down below. “That’s it,” he said at last as he removed a clod of muck from under the flap of the valve, “I got it!” We exchanged grins, and I gave him back his flashlight. “Now, that we’ve got this fixed, maybe you can tell me who you are and what your business is.”
