by Howard Engel
Lije appeared at the table holding a bottle in his chubby hands. They hung on the shortest of arms. I tried to imagine him at the wheel of a speedboat somewhere in the upper Niagara, between the coast guard and the falls, with a boat full of bonded Canadian booze. He was inviting us to have some cognac. I said sure. Why not? Last night I’d felt pretty gloomy, but now I was enjoying the food, the drink and the company. I took a sip of the cognac, and it bit my lip. I took a bigger sip, to bite it back, and it snapped at my gullet all the way down.
Peter was leaning forward on his arms which had pushed away his dinner plate. “How you feeling, pardner?” he said to me.
“Doing fine, sheriff. What time’s the hanging?”
“No neck-tie party today, pardner. We’re plumb out of suspects. The only thing we got is Harrow’s goat, and I think we’ll roast that nice and slow. He didn’t much appreciate the help you gave him on this case, did he?”
“You noticed that?” Savas chimed in, worrying his teeth with his tongue.
“The surprise is that the bugger didn’t create a royal rumpus when we dumped it all on the table.” I grinned at the love birds on the willow pattern. “The thing I still can’t get straight,” Pete said, dredging up the last of the cognac in his glass, “is Zekerman’s death. Benny, run that one by me again.” I groaned, and pretended to collapse, but both Pete and Chris protested. I had to reach for the rusty gearshift and try to engage my wits with my mouth still loping along in neutral.
“All right, you guys, but this is the last time.”
“Right.”
“Okay. Zekerman’s death didn’t have anything to do with Hilda’s holy plot to punish the other two. You understand that she couldn’t accept the truth about her sister. She couldn’t even see that her death was accidental. Elizabeth took too much, or from a bad batch. She was still alive when Ward and Yates took her back to the residence, but only barely. Ward set the stage for the suicide. But Corso, who’d been closest to Elizabeth, started to crack. Ward and Yates must have found out that he was in contact with Hilda. They knew that the secret had to be contained. So they popped Corso.
“And nothing happened for a whole bunch of years. Corso and Elizabeth were dead. Hilda was in a mental hospital, and Ward and Yates went about making lots of money and joining expensive clubs. They got married, they became as respectable as their parents had been. Chester was always turning a sod or talking to the Canadian Club; Ward was always cutting ribbons or whispering sound advice into the shell-like ear of His Worship the Mayor. Then this neat little world of theirs was threatened by the past. Zekerman had found out about extracurricular activities back at Secord University. Hilda Blake, fresh out of Queen Street, spilled all the sordid details to her shrink. He heard about the illegal drugs, the interrupted burglary that ended with the guard getting hurt, the deaths of Elizabeth and then Corso. I’ll bet he couldn’t believe his luck. He already ran a profitable business. There are plenty of people in this town who are glad Zekerman is out of the way. So, for a long time, Zekerman milked Ward and Yates like an ant milks an aphid; he was reasonable, not pressing them too much on any one occasion because he knew that there was going to be a next and a next.
“Then he heard about Core Two from Chester. Zekerman was a greedy bastard from the day he slipped off the delivery table trying to steal the forceps. He wasn’t satisfied with a monthly hand-out any more. He wanted a share of the profits.”
I reached into my pocket and brought out an envelope. In it I’d placed the page of appointments Martha had sent me and a piece of paper I’d been scribbling on. I passed the original sheet to Pete.
Jones
Saturday, 2 A.M.
Henry
Friday, 11 P.M.
Bill
Friday, 1 A.M.
Peters
Friday, 2 P.M.
Careless
Friday, 8 P.M.
Harney
Friday, 7 P.M.
Evans
Friday, 9 A.M.
York
Friday, 2 P.M.
Henderson
Friday, 6 A.M.
Evans
Friday, 3 P.M.
Peters
Friday, 6 P.M.
Richards
Friday, 1 A.M.
Dodge
Friday, 8 P.M.
Plymouth
Friday, 8 A.M.
Ford
Friday, 9 A.M.
Williams
Friday, 6 P.M.
Roberts
Friday, 4 A.M.
He looked at it for a while and then passed it without comment to Chris Savas. Savas examined it, smiled and returned it to me.
“When I first saw it,” I continued. “I couldn’t make heads or tails of it: all of those ordinary names, the car names, names that meant nothing, or very little, to Martha Tracy, Chester’s secretary. Then one night I decided to forget about the names. They might be there only to confuse things. So what’s left: a bunch of appointments for a Friday and Saturday running right around the clock with no time off for things like sleeping or eating. The meetings are all helter-skelter so it’s hard to see who’s coming next. But then I got the idea that the order was the key. That phrase I just used ‘around the clock’ hit me again. I drew a circle and represented on it the numbers on the face of a clock. Now, if each hour represented a letter, then you’d have to go around twice to include all but the last two letters in the English alphabet. The last two letters would take us into Saturday. Friday 1 A.M. equals A; Friday 2 A.M. equals B; and so on down to Saturday 2 A.M. equals Z. Well, I tried it out.” Here I passed around the table the second piece of paper:
Z WANTS IN FOR A THIRD
I heard Pete’s low whistle as he passed the sheet to Chris.
“My guess is that this is a rough copy of the message Chester sent to Ward, a message which tipped Ward off to the stakes the greedy shrink was playing for. Ward was a practical man, he knew that he would have to do something about Zekerman.”
“But didn’t the picture change when Yates caught it?” Pete asked.
“How could it? Chester’s share would be paid into the company. Ward’s interests were legally guaranteed no matter who headed up Chester’s company. But Chester’s death decided Ward to act as quickly as he could to eliminate this bloodsucker. He knew that Zekerman kept no secretary or receptionist; he knew that he wouldn’t run into any other patients. He just kept his regular appointment, and when he found a moment, he clobbered Zekerman with his own African statue. When he’d made sure that he was dead, he went over the office carefully, taking the appointment book, a group of files including his own and Chester’s, and anything else with his name on it. In another two minutes, he was walking back to his office.
“Funny thing about that: as soon as he examined the files, he knew Zekerman hid his dirty secrets elsewhere. Ward and I both started wondering where that might be just about the same time. I got to the blackmail files only minutes ahead of his boys.”
“So Hilda Blake had unwittingly tipped Zekerman to the prospects of blackmailing the same two she’d sworn to kill.”
“Yes, but Zekerman was pretty sure that it was Hilda who killed Chester. That’s another ironic thing about this case. Zekerman was so greedy to get his third of the profits from Core Two that he wanted to warn Ward about Hilda. He told me on the phone to watch out for Ward. He didn’t mean that I should be careful of him, but that Ward should be on the look-out himself.”
“Tell me, Ben,” Savas said, leaning across the table, “when did you get all those women straightened out?” I thought about that one for a moment, enjoying the cognac and the concentration in the four eyes opposite.
“Well, Phoebe Campbell worried me right from the start, but I felt I had to run with that in order to find out what was going on,” I lied. “I didn’t start putting all those faces together until I got an itch at the back of my knees when I saw the Secord University crest on the bookends in Elizabeth Tilford’s room. I
had Hilda Blake in the back of my head from then on.”
“Did you ever find out what that whispering was that your neighbour, the chiropodist, heard just before she hit him?”
“Easy. He heard the rustle of her skirts, and was just about to turn, when she connected.”
“Here’s to the rustle of skirts!”
“Long may they rustle!” We drank to that and didn’t talk for a few minutes, each of us attuned to the sound of a different rustle. Pete broke the silence.
“It’s a good thing there won’t be a trial,” he said. “They would have locked her away this time for the rest of her life.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “The funny thing is, that after she’d successfully assassinated those two, she was as sane as I am, which isn’t saying much, I admit. But she had planned all the chapters—even the last. I saw the phial of pills in her hand when I said good night. I knew that I’d never see her again. And she saw that I knew. One of those circles of knowing.”
“She was dead when we got there. How come it took you until midnight to remember our phone number?” I shrugged, and examined the bottom of my empty glass. I didn’t like the idea of Hilda being dead. I could still picture her sitting in the garden, watching the cares drop away from her as she made her confession.
“Where’s Lije with that cognac?” Savas asked.
“So, that’s it?” Pete cocked his head in my direction. “Now it’s up to all the lawyers. It could go on for years.”
“Especially now that the cat’s out of the bag about the scam Ward was practising on an unsuspecting city council.”
“In the end, Myrna Yates is going to become a very rich widow. With her looks, she won’t be a widow for long.”
“Harrington’s resigned. The mayor has been running scared, won’t talk to reporters, won’t make a statement. There were questions asked in the Legislature. There’ll be a cabinet shuffle at the very least. There’s been talk of a Royal Commission to investigate.”
The cognac must have been getting to me. Pete and Chris kept on talking, but I was taking in only every other word. Hilda had dreamed for years of killing off Yates and Ward. Now she’d done it. And her revenge was still working away like a mother of vinegar. Both men had been totally discredited. Their reputations have been through the shredder. Their clubs not only removed their names from membership, but fixed it so that they’d never been members. Once large firm, with nothing to do with this story, quietly dropped the name Ward from the hyphenated name. The old family crests had fallen off the wall. At a boy’s private school the plaque which displayed the names of the winning school “eight” for 1960, was mutilated so that now there were only six. The thing that Ward feared most, the motive that had carried him from one coverup to the next, family disgrace, was still at work. Hilda’s revenge was a continuing process, not something over and done with. I don’t think Hilda had counted on that.
Savas was talking: “A lot of people were involved all right, but since Ward’s dead, he’ll get most of the blame.”
“Myrna deserved better than Chester from the start. Better than Ward too for that matter.”
“Funny the way Harrow took it all so calmly at the end. I thought he’d have our guts for garters.” Pete said. I shrugged. I hadn’t mentioned to Pete or Chris that I’d had a word with Sergeant Harrow. I wasn’t going to run afoul of him any more. He’d been the policeman who’d helped Harrington cover up that hit-and-run job. Harrow knew I wasn’t launching into the extortion business, but he knew when to bet and when to fold, so when I told him that I was on to him, he smiled a yellow smile and threw his cards in the middle of the table.
“Hey, Benny! Come back to the conversation.” Both of them were looking at me.
“Sorry. You were saying that Myrna Yates is going to be a rich widow. I didn’t miss a word. As a matter of fact, she’s already playing Lady Bountiful.”
“What do you mean?” asked Pete, wiping his chin on a crumpled napkin.
“Well, I got a message through Martha Tracy asking me if I would accept, in addition to a fair settlement of my outstanding account for services rendered, the gift of a brand new ten-speed bicycle.”
The boys grinned and Lije came round with the cognac again. I liked the idea of the bicycle. It was what I needed to change my luck. There was a whole cast of characters I wanted to forget and couldn’t, pictures I saw at night that I couldn’t turn to the wall. Maybe the bike would get me out into the country more. I could use the exercise. I had a whole summer of warm weather to look forward to, and with it I was hoping that a fresh ripple of divorce business might find its way up my twenty-eight steps. The summer should be good for that.
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