by Howard Engel
“Yes. For a while I could see that something was bothering her; she could never hide anything from me. She had one of those faces that can never keep a secret. I asked her what it was, and she told me, making a long sad story of it. But I knew that we needn’t be separated for long. I was getting well, and with time off for good behaviour, I might look forward to leaving within a few months. I could feel the burden of strength in the relationship passing to me that morning. Do you know what I mean? I had changed what she had seen as a parting into promise and hope. I became the older sister, in a way. We began to make plans about what we would do when I was well.
“When she retired, she came to see me every day. The other nurses joked that the only way to get Liz really to retire would be to give me my walking papers. And that’s what they did eventually. They declared me as sound as a steel hull, and toasted my launching with champagne in the nurses’ lounge. Against the rules, of course, but as Liz would have said, very gratifying.”
“You shared an apartment for several weeks only.”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to tell me about that?”
“You’re just like some of my doctors, Ben.” She looked at me, smiling in a rather sleepy way, then took a deep breath for courage and continued. “Liz and I planned to go on a camping trip as soon as I got out of the hospital. It was a thing I’d never done. She came from Sault Ste. Marie, and it was second nature to her. I didn’t think for a minute that the route she’d picked—a trail up the Montreal River, a hundred miles north of the Sault— would be too much for her. Despite her age, she was tireless. I don’t know anything about her previous medical history, Ben, but she didn’t wake up the second night out. I’d never seen a dead person before. I was frightened. I took her purse with her driver’s licence and papers to show to the authorities, and left Liz in the tent, zipped up inside her sleeping bag. We were about a mile from a very faint path, but before I left, I tried to memorize exactly where the tent was, so that I could lead back a rescue party.
“I must have walked for two days without sleeping. I won’t bother trying to describe what it was like. If I hadn’t gone through the experience of being crazy, I would have nothing to compare it with. Eventually, I stumbled on to the highway about a mile above where we’d left the car. As I climbed into the driver’s seat, I locked the door behind me and fell into a deep sleep. When I woke, it was dark, but the moon was full. I remember seeing Liz’s bag lying in the moonlight on the passenger’s seat. I think that that was when I realized that I wasn’t going to report Liz’s death. I knew that it was a gift of fate or something. It was Liz’s gift to me. She’d been dearer to me than anyone I’d known after my sister. To her, I’d been the family she’d never known. And now she was giving me the tools I needed to complete my mission.
“From that day, I became Liz Tilford. I cancelled the apartment, mentioned vaguely in a couple of places that she’d gone to live in the Sault with a married sister, and moved first back here to my mother’s house in order to make my plans. I knew that my time was limited. Someone would find the tent in the woods. Someone would suspect something from the uncashed pension cheques. I knew that I had to act quickly, and I did.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Hilda Blake paused in her story, giving me a smile that mingled both pride and sweetness. It was with difficulty that I kept myself from identifying with her. I found I was silently cheering when circumstances made her task easier and damning the obstacles to her revenge. She had made herself totally the weapon of her hate, and yet she remained somehow uncorrupted by it. Her account was precise and unaffected. She was incredibly calm.
The afternoon shadows were lengthening. I was beginning to be glad I had my jacket. Hilda held her elbows with the opposite hands. She sighed a little. “Ben, I’ve been talking far too long. It’s your turn. Tell me how I did it.”
I hadn’t expected to be challenged so directly, as if this was some television play or a party game. But these last few days had been full of surprises. Did I honestly expect Hilda Blake to behave like anybody else? I kept telling myself that she was as crazy as a tailor with two customers and one pair of pants. If I wasn’t careful, I thought, I could fall into her vision and get lost.
“You came back to Grantham a year ago, the end of March, beginning of April. For some reason, maybe it was habit, maybe something they’d said to you in the hospital, you decided to see a therapist. You were certain, and sure of your mission, or destiny, but you wanted to be sure that you would remain well enough to execute your design. I don’t know how you happened to pick Dr. Andrew Zekerman.”
“I tried three others and couldn’t get an appointment. Then I tried him.” From the way she said “him,” I could tell that she didn’t like this part of the story.
““Zekerman found you a fascinating patient, but not for the reasons you might guess. He discovered in the story you told him about your past certain unprofessional interests of his own. He began to take you over and over the same ground. He wanted to know all about what happened at Secord University.”
“He told me that it was to make me accept what had happened.” There was a tremor in her voice for the first time. She was agitated by Zekerman’s presence in the story.
“Dr. Zekerman was a blackmailer. You were a source that gave him information about two people who were rich enough to make him find the practice of psychiatry dull and unrewarding. He used what you told him, and what his own research turned up, to squeeze a lot of money from both Yates and Ward. And he was about to try for higher stakes.” Hilda’s hand had gone involuntarily to her throat. The clear skin of her cheeks and neck coloured. At first I thought that since Zekerman’s schemes had nothing to do with hers, she could feel normal outrage for the victims. But the look on her face was closer to anger or anxiety.
“He nearly spoiled everything. I didn’t know why he pushed himself in uninvited. It still bothers me to think about the way he tried to confuse and change what I had to do. He was just greedy, as you say, he had no special purpose as I had.”
“As Elizabeth Tilford you applied for a job in Chester Yates’ office. He took you on. That put you close to Chester so that you could watch his every move. You discovered that he kept a loaded target pistol in his cupboard, and that he enjoyed a drink at the end of the day from his hidden bar.”
“He boasted about being an expert shot,” she said. “Anything Bill couldn’t do, Chester gloried in.”
“The job put you in the right place to be noticed by Bill Ward, who could never resist a pretty face. He invited you out. You played up to him, flattered his vanity, laughed at his jokes.”
“Do you despise me for that?” She was sitting straight in her chair now, challenging, her red hair quite dark in the failing light.
“I don’t come into this at all. I’m just an investigator. I’m no judge or jury.”
“You think it was a low trick to take advantage of them that way. I can tell. But I sacrificed myself as well as them. You must see that?”
“All I can see is that you let Ward make love to you on and off for two months in his little place on Bellevue Terrace, while you studied the way the locks worked and discovered the best way to cut through the hedges and back lanes, all for future reference.
“In order to be free to move as you chose, you thought it best to disappear from the office. You left just after Chester warned you that he would have to let you go. You’d nearly finished with the Liz Tilford identity anyway. But people like Martha Tracy remembered you. Martha tried to be your friend. But you didn’t have time for that. You were getting ready for your job by reading about how Brutus killed Caesar for the good of Rome, how Medea sacrificed her children for the good of her self-respect, and how Charlotte Corday assassinated Marat for the good of France. You saw yourself in a noble tradition, not just a murderer, but a dedicated avenger. Your own sacrifice was part of the mission from the beginning.
“You picked Chester first. You went to th
e building a little after five that Thursday afternoon. You hoped to find him there having a drink at the end of the business day. You knew that your sudden reappearance would spark his interest enough for him to drop whatever business lay on the desk in front of him.”
“He was surprised to see me. He got up and invited me in, quizzed me about where I’d been hiding. He offered me a drink, but I said I’d get one for both of us. Chester liked to be well looked after.”
“You used the bar towel so you only touched the glasses. You put something into Chester’s drink that you’d brought with you. Chloral hydrate is the usual stuff in detective stories, but you’d been talking to Liz Tilford. Maybe she told you that knock-out drops aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Maybe she told you about the new short-acting barbiturates. Something like secobarb would be just the thing. You’d be taking a chance that someone might order a full-scale post mortem. The drug would turn up fast enough in a toxicology examination, or if samples of the tissues were sent to the Forensic Centre. But by now you were taking a lot of chances.
“You brought him his drink, and watched the drug take hold. As soon as he passed out, you went to the cupboard, picked up the gun with the towel, and pressed it into Chester’s right hand. You placed his finger in the trigger guard, lifted the gun to his head and applied a little pressure to his finger. It was easy. Now all you had to do was put the towel-wrapped glasses in your bag. You took the stairs to get out, I think, and you’d been clear of the building for half an hour when the security man came into Chester’s office looking for a free drink.” I didn’t know how I was managing to tell Hilda all this without taking a smoke. I guess that looking at her taking all this from me was intoxication enough.
“I think that it was on the day of Chester’s funeral, you kept an appointment with Dr. Zekerman. Zekerman knew nothing about Liz Tilford or her disappearance. Hilda Blake had never disappeared. You saw that he was frightened. Chester’s death upset him so much that he was even afraid of you. He told you about sending a few choice items out of your past to a private investigator who had bothered him on the weekend. There are even fewer private investigators in Grantham that there are shrinks. Maybe he boasted my name.”
“He did. He ranted about how he’d insured his life. He didn’t accuse me, he just talked.” She was rubbing her wrists automatically. Zekerman had a way of doing it to her.
“You couldn’t be sure what it was he sent me, but you knew that you had to try to get it back before you turned your full attention to Ward. I don’t know where you got the name Phoebe Campbell. I suspect it goes back to the hospital.”
“She was a patient; she still is, she still is.”
“The details about the job at the bank were very convincing, as was the brunette wig. It took me a long time to see that your green and rust outfit had been chosen to go with red hair, not brown.”
The light had started to fade from the sky, and the city below the escarpment was debating with itself whether it was dark enough to turn on the streetlights. When I was a boy, I used to try to have my eyes glued to the lights on our street so that I could see them go on all at once. I remembered that and the fact that I was never looking at the right moment.
“You came to my office with a ruse to get me out of the way so that you would have time to look for whatever Zekerman had sent me. As you discovered, he hadn’t sent me much, a few indecipherable pages of routine notes. But I’m glad you didn’t get this,” I said, reaching into my breast pocket and showing her the picture of two little girls in their kilts. She took the picture from me and looked at it for a long time.
“May I have it now?” she asked, trying to disguise the urgency of the request. I nodded. I wouldn’t need it any more. And I didn’t think that at this point Hilda Blake would begin destroying evidence. She propped the picture against the side of the pitcher, which was now only a third full. By now it had grown too cool for cool drinks.
“By giving me the gun that had been used to wound the security guard, you were putting something incriminating into Ward’s house. I was stupid not to see that you’d switched parcels. You knew that I wouldn’t take a package with unknown contents around the block without looking first. You wanted me to be detained at the house while you went through my office. You had to do it that way because there’s no telling when I’m likely to show up: three in the morning or three in the afternoon, they’re all the same to me when I’m working on something. At the same time, you wanted the cops to get the gun. I don’t know for sure what you hoped to accomplish. But I guess the gun meant something to you: the interrupted robbery, your sister’s death, and most of all, Yates and Ward. You hoped that the police would be able to read the gun like a book, get them to start asking questions about those good old Golden Rule days at Secord. You couldn’t know that it was only by an extraordinary piece of luck the gun was linked to that robbery. But the trail ended there. The registration of the gun led nowhere. It didn’t lead to Ward. Bad luck.
“More bad luck when you ran into my boozy neighbour, Frank Bushmill. He heard you ferreting around in my office. You heard him call out in time to hide behind the door. When he came in, you hit him. Very professionally. What did you use?”
“I had some shot inside two pairs of woollen socks. I hope I didn’t hurt him too badly?”
“I’m not sure I know what you think is badly enough.” Hilda looked confused by the word games. It had been a cheap shot, and I was sorry. “Anyway, he’s fine now, completely restored to his dipsomania.”
“It’s dark. The lights are coming on down below.”
“Yes, so they are. I missed seeing it. I’m nearly finished.”
“In a strange way, Mr. Cooperman—Ben—I’m enjoying this. It’s one thing to be found out when you intended to get away with something. But since I never meant to fool anyone for long, I at least have the satisfaction of knowing that I will not be misunderstood. You can be my witness.”
“Now we come to Bill Ward. He told me that you’d telephoned him. I warned him to be careful of you, but he wouldn’t listen. By then, he knew who you were, and may have believed that you were involved in Chester’s death. He thought that his bodyguards would give him ample protection.”
“We went for a drink, first.” Hilda said. She wasn’t looking at me, but staring out over the edge of the escarpment where the hawks had been flying in the afternoon. She was curled sideways in her chair for warmth, hugging herself with her arms.
“Will you take my jacket?”
“No, let’s finish. He was pretending that he didn’t connect me with the past, but he’d been drinking; he got careless. It was nearly midnight when he drove back to Bellevue Terrace.”
“Just as he’d driven you there so many times before. He drove into the garage and closed the door. Somehow you got him to get back into the front seat of the car. Then you distracted him and while he was in that condition, you jabbed him with a needle, another memento of your friendship with Liz Tilford. He may not have felt a thing.”
“He did, actually. I told him it was a pin in my dress. He made a joke, I forget what, and then he began to get groggy.”
“After he passed out, you found his keys, let yourself into the house and returned them to him. The last act was to turn on the car’s ignition. You let yourself out the back door of the house, cut through the hedge to the lane and eventually made your way back here. You couldn’t know that in the morning his bodyguards would attempt to save Ward’s good name by driving him away from what might be seen by the authorities as a love nest, and sending him into the quarry. That spoiled the fine finish you’d planned, but at least it wasn’t your fault. And once the police began stripping away the sham of a not very convincing accident, they had what looked to them like another suicide.” I paused and took a minute to catch my breath. Hilda’s penetrating eyes were fixed on me. I’d finished, but she was waiting for more. For what? A verdict? A sentence?
“You’ve done what you swore to do, and y
ou did it selflessly and with dispatch. Your sister’s death, Hilda, is thoroughly revenged.”
“I didn’t expect anyone to have understood so well. I never feared being caught, I expected that, but I was afraid of the story getting twisted, afraid they’d dismiss me as a lunatic.”
I didn’t see her get up, but when I brought my eyes back from the place where the garden dropped away, I saw that her chair was empty. I rose involuntarily. She was standing in front of me in the gloom. “I’m glad it was you, Ben. And I want to give you something.” From her collar she unfastened a small brooch, which she pressed into my hand. I could feel the hair on my arms prickling. She put her hands lightly on my chest and kissed me. In a moment, she was back in her chair as though nothing had happened. “I’m quite calm now,” she said. I looked out at the dark shapes above the glow of the city. Minutes went by, falling over the edge.
“What are you going to do, Ben?” The voice was tranquil.
“You know very well.”
“Yes,” she said with a sigh, “and I know what I must do.” She sounded content and peaceful. There wasn’t a thing I could say. She smiled at me there in the dark, and I looked at her for a long time without moving. Neither of us said anything more. Below us, the lights of traffic were snaking between the straight lines of streetlights. There were thousands of lights down below, but somehow they didn’t cut through the darkness.
TWENTY-NINE
It was the night of the day after. We were sitting at one of Lije Swift’s tables on the road to Niagara. It was well after midnight and I’d been drinking. Pete Staziak and Chris Savas had taken me under their wings. I’d been roped into coming out to Lije’s for a real feed, Pete called it, and it had been. Cheese stuffed into the hollow of celery sticks, then there was duck from some lake in Quebec, covered with orange slices, a mixture of supper and breakfast.
The French wine helped. It helped a lot. I could hear Pete and Chris talking over me while I concentrated on getting the last of the crisp skin off the final piece of breast. I didn’t try to pull any of the sound close, I let it sail past. I’d become sick of the sound of my own voice lately, always telling about suicides that weren’t suicides, and all those women who were really the same woman.
