The Suicide Murders

by Howard Engel

  “Oh, that’ll take years to settle. Meanwhile, there’s an administrator looking after the day-to-day stuff, and a board of directors with Chester’s wife on it making the policy decisions. I’ve still got my job, that’s all I care about.”

  “What time will you be at home? I want to look at those things Elizabeth Tilford left behind when she disappeared.”

  “Elizabeth? You worried about her? She’ll lay you out, Cooperman.”

  “Just doing my job.”

  “Well, I’ll be home after six. Give me an hour or so to eat and you can have some coffee.”’

  “Good. I’ll see you.”

  I was going to phone Savas at Regional Police, but I was out of dimes. So I went into the United and asked for a coffee. The lunch rush had thinned out and it was easy to find space. Further down the counter the Mad Writer was scribbling away on his great work. My waitress looked rather too tough to wear a big blue ribbon on her rear. Some girls should have their aprons stapled on. I fished out a pack of Players and lit the last of them.

  On the whole, I wasn’t feeling as tough as I expected to feel. I thought that maybe, with a little luck, I’d make it an early night. Last week at this time I was tailing Chester to his last appointment with Dr. Zekerman. I wondered if Chester knew about his appointment with his murderer. It could have been accidental. Or could it? The murderer knew where he kept his target pistol. He knew that the security guard never arrived until close to six, and that the whole floor was practically soundproof from the other floors. The two of them had a drink. Martha said she’d bought a set of eight glasses; I saw only six. So maybe he left with two of those glasses wrapped in the bar-towel, probably faster than wiping off fingerprints. But why take both? Why not leave one of them on Chester’s desk, as a jolt of Dutch courage to stiffen him for the fatal act? No, he had to take both glasses because he had handled both. He poured the drinks and brought them to the desk. It would be easy to use the bar-towel while pouring the drinks, with his back to Chester, but it would look too foolish to carry both drinks with it.

  I started thinking about the clipping that I was still carrying in my inside breast pocket about the suicide of Elizabeth Blake. I thought it wouldn’t hurt to take a quick run out to the Secord University. The library was crowded with students, and as far as I could see there was no running water to distract the avid reader. I filled in a pink form and ordered the 1964 volume of the Secord Standard, the school paper, and found a place near a window to plough through it.

  I found an account of Elizabeth Blake’s death that added nothing to what I already knew. There were pictures of an ice fort built during an unexpected school break, when the campus was closed down for a week by a record snowfall. I flipped through the rest of the fat, black-bound volume to kill ten minutes. I felt guilty returning the book in less time than it took to find it in the stacks and sign it out to me. I read a few smart-ass movie reviews that didn’t find much to like in anything. The football games sounded like the ones today. The name of a kid who went on to write comic pieces in one of the Toronto papers was prominent in nearly every issue. Then I hit it. A twenty-four-year-old honours chemistry student named Joe Corso took a drop of six stories from the balcony outside one of the chemistry labs. 1965 was certainly a year for it. A couple of his pals said that he had been broken-hearted since he’d been turned down by the scholarship committee at M.I.T. That sounded fair enough. I nearly cut my throat when I flunked grade two. The cute bit of information came in the last paragraph which named Corso’s two pals: Chester Yates and William Allen Ward. As chummy a pair of chief mourners as you could wish for.

  I made a couple of calls from the library phone. The first got me the Alumni Association, which got me the representative of the 1964 graduating year. Within ten minutes and four dimes later I had a link which joined the dead girl and the dead chemistry student. Yes, they had dated and yes it had been serious.

  At the Diana Sweets I ordered a vanilla marshmallow sundae and a vanilla milkshake. With that on my stomach, I thought I’d call Savas. It took about six rings before he answered.

  “Savas,” he croaked.

  “You sound like you’ve been up all night.”

  “I’m up all night every night, shamus.”

  “Don’t try to make me feel guilty for your sins. I’ve got enough of my own. What’s happening?”

  “Cooperman, we checked out your Phoebe Campbell. She’s made of smoke. We covered the waterfront on this. Not only isn’t she anywhere now, she never was anywhere. Not under that name and not with that description. Sure you’re not seeing things?”

  “I’ve got two hundred dollars in my wallet that she gave me for last night’s B and E. Is that evidence?”

  “Two hundred dollars’ worth. Doesn’t buy much.”

  “Savas, you ever hear of Joe Corso?”

  “Sounds like a football player. Who does he play for, the Cleveland Browns?”

  “I know that you guys are tripping over all the suicides that have been happening, but I’ve got another for you. I was up at Secord University this morning looking into Elizabeth Blake’s death in the school paper. Nothing new there. But a couple of weeks later a chemistry whiz named Corso took a long walk on a short balcony of the Chemistry Building and didn’t live to graduate head of his class. There are a couple of things about this that might interest you: the pals that told everybody that he was feeling blue because he missed a big scholarship were Yates and Ward. The topper is that his girlfriend was Elizabeth Blake.”

  “So he killed himself out of sympathy? So what?”

  “Come on. Nobody’s that sympathetic.”

  “Look, Cooperman, all this stuff isn’t worth peanut shells without a story to tie it all together. I bet you can find that Dr. Zekerman was the head of the Chemistry Department under an assumed name or something. Do you get me? I can’t touch this stuff without a trunk full of old-fashioned evidence. You can’t get anywhere on a murder charge with a bunch of affidavits. Hang in there. You’re a good peeper, Cooperman, but you’d make a lousy cop. I’ll be talking to you. Goodbye.”

  I’d killed about as much time on the phone as I could profitably do, so I cut across the street and took a run at the twenty-eight steps leading to my door. I had a little over an hour before Pete’s call was due, so I drew up a list and started drawing arrows from one name to another. Before I messed it up with doodles, it looked like this:

  Elizabeth Blake ............ 1964 (suicide)

  Joe Corso ...................... 1964 (suicide)

  Chester Yates ................ present (suicide)

  Andrew Zekerman ........ present (murder)

  To this list I added:

  William Allen Ward

  Elizabeth Tilford .......... present (disappeared)

  Phoebe Campbell ......... present (disappeared)

  Vernon Harrington

  Myrna Yates

  I guess just about any of them might have had a motive, even Myrna. As the widow with a lot to gain, she could throw the law off by pointing to me as the sleuth she’d hired to look into her husband’s untimely end. Phoebe Campbell fitted into this crazy web in some way. The story she told me about Twining could fit Ward just as well. He was a well-known sniffer of girls’ bicycle seats. But I couldn’t see why she’d want to beat that African carving to splinters with Zekerman’s head. And why kill Chester? If she was disappointed in love, why not go after Ward? Same with the Tilford woman. She was pushed out of bed by Phoebe, or so it looks. Tilford knew Chester, knew the office lay-out, but, according to Martha, she got on with him fine. Besides, she looked less like a doer than a done to at the moment.

  It was at Ward’s name that I looked longest. He had a dirty finger in the eye of everyone on the list. He was at the University at the same time both Elizabeth Blake and Joe Corso were killed. He knew Chester since they were both in Pampers. He was in on the bottom floor of the Core Two development. Myrna Yates has been in love with him since the year one, and h
e had had affairs with both of the missing women. Ward could have been one of Zekerman’s suckers. Zekerman sounds as though he was pumping Harrington for information that would give him leverage on Ward or on Chester. Funny, how I keep calling Yates “Chester.” I never met him, but he seems an altogether more likeable bum than Ward. Nobody’s obliged to speak well of the living.

  NINETEEN

  The light comes into the office on a slant through the dusty windows. Somehow it bugged me, and I didn’t like being bugged by things I couldn’t do anything about. The window cleaners came twice a year; for the other three hundred and sixty-three days, the windows were filthy. I couldn’t keep my bottom on the chair; I couldn’t concentrate. I went out, thinking vaguely of getting a cup of coffee or a pack of cigarettes, when I got an idea. In another three minutes, I was in the Olds and driving along the Power Gorge Road. Traffic was light, and the sun licked at the curves of the creek on my left all the way. I passed Zekerman’s mailbox and took the next turn to the left, which took me down into the creek valley. I crossed the creek and turned the car around in the next driveway.

  I stopped the car on the Red Bridge across the Eleven Mile Creek. It wasn’t red any longer, but it had been when I was a kid and used to watch the fast gray water moving under its timbers. From where I stood with the motor idling evenly, I could see up to Pelham Road, where at one end Myrna Yates’ father used to run a car wrecker’s, and at the other I could make out the elaborate ranch-style shape of Dr. Zekerman’s place. I could see the aluminum shed where we had met so explosively and down by the water was a smaller wooden shed—the potting shed. I’d been thinking a lot about that potting shed since my last conversation with Harrington. If I was going to try my hand at extortion or blackmail, I think I’d like a nice quiet potting shed to keep my dirt in.

  As I got nearer I could see the shed more clearly. It was made of plywood, with a small gable roof. A bunch of red letters screamed at me “Beware of the Dog.” I’d seen the tired old Irish wolf-hound last weekend, and wasn’t impressed. The door faced away from the creek. It was a Yale lock, which gave fairly easily after nicking the corner off a credit card. Inside, I was looking at the creek through an iron mesh safety shutter and the kind of glass that imprisons chicken wire. It was a potting shed, all right. The place was liberally supplied with clay flower pots of all sizes and shapes. It smelled of dead leaves. A pair of gardening gloves caught the light on a counter that stood waist high against one wall. On it lay all of the implements you would expect to find, but which I wasn’t looking for. The drawers under the counter showed more of what I wasn’t looking for. The walls showed no cupboards, the floor no trapdoors.

  It was small, so I didn’t have to do much searching when I’d lifted up the last of the pressed paper starter boxes. Under the window, a bunch of geraniums were languishing, like the once back at my office. Mine were in a bad way because they badly needed to be transplanted, but these stood in a large square bin of moist potting soil. I tested the bottom with a green bamboo tomato stake. The bottom was less than three inches from the surface. It began to look more interesting. I examined the edges of the bin and found small holes on the insides near the corners. I looked around me for something to go into the holes, and at the same time began to get the feeling that I might not be left undisturbed for very much longer. In one corner I found a set of wires ending in hooks, attached at the other end to a nylon rope. I flipped the yellow strand over a two-by-four above the bin, set the hooks in place, and pulled on the slack end of the rope. The bin lifted clean out of its setting, and when I got it up a few feet I tied off the rope and took a look. What I saw was a rather rusty well-type filing cabinet. It just fit the hiding place, with enough room for the lid to clear when I opened it up.

  With all the care Zekerman had taken in preparing this surprise for me, he might have hidden a fortune in gold, or the missing Russian Crown Jewels or something. What I knew I could expect were the sordid secrets from the lives that Zekerman leeched from. I rifled through the red files. There was one marked Vernon Harrington. What had he done? Nothing more than a hushed-up hit-and-run charge. A black eye for a politician and for the cop who put the lid on it. The next file told the story of a drunk-driving charge that had been kept quiet so that another leading citizen could go on with important civic work. I wondered whether they were all sleeping better since the good doctor had permanently ceased practising. In the file marked Chester Yates, I found the original of the Xeroxed clipping sent through the mail. Then I hit pay-dirt: a file marked William Allen Ward. A great big birthday present. But right away somebody spilled chocolate milk all over the tablecloth. I heard a car stop on the near side of the bridge. I grabbed something from the file. My feet were already moving me to the door.

  Once outside, I beat a retreat to the bushes along the creek. A muskrat frowned at me from the waterline, but didn’t advertise my presence. The bushes smelled of decaying leaves and the water of garbage. The clay of the bank was rubbed smooth by the bellies of the animals going in and out of the water. I could hear voices, but the shed itself masked my view of the path. The voices reached the shed and stopped. After a few hour-like minutes on damp knees with the sound of the creek almost as loud as the thumping inside my jacket, I heard the voices again, retreating. At the same time, I could make out smoke curling around one wall. I heard a sudden popping noise, and flames could be seen on both sides of the shed. I was far enough away so that I knew I was safe from the fire, but it had come so unexpectedly, I felt like I was still inside. It burned quickly, like a burning school-house firework. When I heard the other car start and drive off, I began moving along the creek towards the bridge where I’d left mine.

  It felt good to hear the motor catch. Through the rearview mirror, I saw the flames had found every draughty cranny of the shed and forced their destructive way through. There was nothing to do but press my foot firmly on the gas.

  When I pulled into a gas station not far from my office, I took my eye off the spinning meter long enough to examine the handful of paper I’d saved from the fire. At first glance it looked like any old piece of newspaper, only it was in German. The name at the top read “Zuricher Zeitung.” The date was 26 January 1976. At the bottom of one of the pages, two nearly identical cartoons appeared. My German was good enough to guess that you were supposed to discover the minute differences between them. I was nearly tempted to return this fascinating document to the shed on the creek, when I saw the picture. A group of men and women dressed in the very best skiing togs was standing chatting near a chair-lift. The caption identified the group. One of the couples named was Herr William Allen Ward und frau von Kanada. I looked up at the picture again. Und frau was Myrna Yates.

  As I opened the door of my office the phone rang. It was Pete. I asked him to tell me the latest news.

  “Harrow told me that they have Ward’s name in Zekerman’s handwriting a couple of times. They also have about six or seven dozen other names, so they aren’t going to pick up Ward right away, if it’s all right with you. They also have a full list of patients treated by Zekerman during the last five years. Ward is there too along with Yates and a hundred other names, including some of our first citizens.”

  “Could I see the list?”

  “I’ll drop an illegal Xerox off to you. Hell, no! I can’t do that. Benny, I keep forgetting you aren’t with the firm. Join the cop shop and see the world.” I could picture him, shutting his eyes while he thought. “Can you come by my office right away? I think I can arrange for it to be sitting some place conspicuous when you come in. I may not be there. They’ve detailed me to look into that quarry skeleton some kids dug up out by the escarpment. I can see that this case is going to be a feather in the coroner’s hat. Most of the work will be done out of town at the Forensic Centre. If I see you, I’ll say hello.”

  “Not if I see you first. Be talking to you.”

  I got my car out and drove as directly as the one way street pattern would let me to
the parking lot behind the Regional Police Building. I was stopped by the door with push-buttons on it, but not for long. I went in as a constable came out. He even held the door open for me. I walked right by the desk as though I knew my way around and had urgent business, but was hauled back before I’d gone many yards down the corridor. When I said that Staziak had asked me to wait in his office, the sergeant look at me, trying to see if he recognized either my front or side view, and finally showed me where Pete’s door stood open. I sat in the chair at Pete’s metal desk and looked down at an open file. The open page was a print-out from a computer, containing about a hundred names and Medicare numbers. Most of the names I didn’t know. A few of them I’d seen in the paper. Harrington was there, so were Yates and Ward. I didn’t have time to write them down. Nor was I a whiz at the memory game.

  I dropped my eyes from name to name, trying to imagine the hold Zekerman held over each of them. And each one, a possible murderer. When I’d scanned all the way to the bottom I was none the wiser. I now had double confirmation that Ward was a patient and I knew that he had been the subject of oblique questions aimed at Vern Harrington. I was happy with that. But I knew that a law court wouldn’t find one name any more attractive than the last. So, I was going to have to find out a little more about William Allen Ward. I think I already knew enough about him to make it a very interesting conversation.

  That should have been a very satisfying thought. But my mind was somehow distracted from it. There was something in the list that had failed to register on my first look at it. I looked down the row on row of names once more. Then, about a third of the way down, hidden, innocent-looking, there it was:

  Hilda Blake

  the sister of the girl who’d been killed by the overdose of drugs back in 1964. The other girl in that photograph, maybe. Probably. So she was getting squeezed by Dr. Zekerman too. He had his needle into everybody. Bad enough losing a sister to a suicidal overdose, but now having to dish out hard-earned money to the greedy doctor. It didn’t seem fair. I hadn’t thought of her as being still in the area. I’d try to look her up as soon as I had both hands untied.