Howard Engel - Getting Away With Murder

“What if somebody had it in for Neustadt?”

“I hear you.”

“If you were under your car and I came along and knew my business, there’s not a lot you could do about it, is there?”

We were quiet again for a few moments. The rock music had gone and had been replaced by distant voices, high-pitched women’s voices, talking rapidly many miles away from Grantham.

“I’m going to look into this thing, Benny. I don’t think anybody around here gave it a thought. I’ll look at the report and see what has to be done.”

“I’ll be hearing from you, then?” I asked.

“The hell you will. This is police business. Internal. I won’t even tell the Inspector about this until I’ve got something I can hold in my hand.” I asked him about our friend Savas’s holiday in Cyprus and speculated on the date of his return. Neither one of us could get very interested in that. Savas in the flesh was a formidable presence, but off at the eastern end of the Mediterranean he wasn’t enough to keep the conversation going. So I hung up, just in time to see Phil, the hood I’d socked from my bed yesterday in my pre-dawn kidnapping, busy pretending not to be busy watching me from the coffee stand. He hadn’t noticed that the stand was shut up for the tight. A good man can never find the cover he needs when he wants it.

Walking home, I thought that the tidiest solution to the problem of Neustadt’s death was this: Abe Wise, that long-lived crook, was living at this moment because he hired more than one man to look after his business for him. Ex-wife Lily was right. If Wise’s enemy was the retired deputy chief, then someone would have been told to do something about it. It seemed an easy enough task to walk up a driveway, release a valve while asking street directions.

But, if Wise was responsible for Neustadt’s death, why would he draw attention to himself by going to the funeral? He told me that his attendance at the funeral was just a device to help blacken Neustadt’s name. That was a joke, wasn’t it? There was no figuring Wise out. That was the only sure thing I got out of my walk.

Anna was waiting for me when I got in. Big surprise. Twice in one week! Once again, I tried to interest her in taking a short vacation in the middle of term. It wasn’t on for a number of reasons. The one I liked best was “because you’re not coming.” It was an honest attempt, but I didn’t get very far trying to argue with her.

The next morning I hoped that things would look better. The view from my window was not reassuring: more dull, cold weather. But the car across the street had become a steadying sign of continuity. Today was linked to yesterday and the rude awakening of the morning before that by that black Toyota. I recognized that there was a time when I had never heard of Abram Wise. That had become, in my imagination, a golden time, something to be likened to the Garden of Eden.

Anna had left hot, fresh coffee on the counter for me. I showered, shaved and dressed thinking of it. While actually drinking the coffee, I started thinking about Ed Neustadt and his Old Testament sense of justice and fair play. But Pete had suggested more than that. He spoke of a kind of craziness, some sort of sadistic fascination. That was getting me a long way from who was trying to kill Abe Wise, but I couldn’t get rid of the notion that it was important.

How could the case of a hard cop, recently dead, have anything to do with my job? If Neustadt had been the threat, then he had been rubbed out. From my point of view as a hireling of Abe Wise, the threat was over and my time as a minion of this arch-crook was about to be terminated. If I was being careful before, now I would have to be doubly careful, because Wise might find it easier to pay me off with a bullet behind the ear rather than with negotiable paper.

With the night-time hours I’d put in yesterday and the day before, I thought I would open the office late on this, the third day of the job. As a matter of fact, I’d decided to finish the pot of coffee and read McStu’s book from cover to cover. And that is what I did.

The story began as the Second World War came to an end. Sergeant Joseph Tatarski was demobilized with the called-up men in his regiment at Camp Niagara, a few miles from here. After being away from home for most of the war, Joe returned to his wife, Anastasia, his daughters, Margaret and Mary, and young son Freddy. All went well until Joe surprised a burglar one night in 1946. There was a fight and Joe was hit over the head and killed. The burglar escaped, leaving a sack of silver-plated wedding presents behind. The investigating officer, young Corporal Ed Neustadt, made a routine report to his sergeant.

Five years later, the burglary was, amazingly, repeated with a similar tragic ending. This time Anastasia, Joe Tatarski’s widow was beaten to death with a table lamp while the household was apparently sleeping. Once again Ed Neustadt, now a sergeant, was in charge of the investigation. McStu suggests, short of inviting a writ for libel, that Neustadt approached this second murder with what he already knew about the first in mind. Picking his words carefully, McStu paints a picture of a policeman discovering that in the earlier case he’d been played for a sap by young Mary Tatarski. The two burglaries ending in two murders were just too convenient except in McStu’s fiction. Neustadt was able to show that the signs of a break-in were a sham and quickly arrested Mary, then a young mother with no husband to stand up for her. Mary was put on trial, early in the new year, 1952, for the murder of her mother. The Crown was able to show a history of conflict and bad feeling that had existed in the house since the father’s death. This was exacerbated when Mary found herself pregnant and in due course gave birth to a baby girl. When the older girl, Margaret, moved away, things got worse. Mary was a wild young woman who had friends who were allowed more liberty than the old-fashioned Anastasia allowed her. Neighbours testified to having heard running arguments, as well as the baby’s cries, coming through the walls of the house. Counsel for Mary stated that the defendant had taken sleeping pills after the most recent noisy confrontation and that she was asleep when the crime occurred. The Crown, through the testimony of an expert, was successful in proving that the pills could just as well have been taken after the murder had been committed. They had apparently been taken in sufficient quantifies to suggest that Mary intended to take her own life.

The trial was short. Although the jury recommended mercy, the judge pronounced the sentence of death. The appeal, which was based on the circumstantial nature of much of the evidence, was rejected, and a few minutes after midnight on Thursday, December 18, 1952, Mary Tatarski walked to the gallows. She was the second-last woman hanged in Canada. It was typical of her bad luck that she couldn’t have contrived to be the last, which would at least have put her in the record books. She was only twenty-two.

On the face of it and judging by today’s standards, the sentence and the punishment were barbaric. But stranger things happened in the 1950s. Other celebrated cases were reopened and retried, sometimes with a change in the verdict. A few years ago Donald Marshall, a young Micmac Indian from near Sydney, Nova Scotia, was freed after spending eleven years behind bars for a murder he had no part in. Certainly there were always activists, like Duncan Harvey locally, who were interested in rehearing the Tatarski case. Edwin Neustadt called them “pinko subversives” and “bleeding hearts.” He fought all their efforts to reopen the investigation. I was beginning to get a fix on the late former deputy chief. He was a charmer, all right. The world was divided into two kinds of people: good guys and bad guys. There was no crossing over, no grey areas, no special cases. I guess, for a policeman, it would simplify things. But what about people like Wise? He has never been convicted of breaking a city by-law. He gives to charity, supports the arts, helps pay for Tannhauser whether he can sit through it or not. Lots of business people today operate in grey areas where the law can’t touch them. Such people would be shocked if you called them crooks. This was the realm of white-collar crime that someone of Neustadt’s frame of mind would have a hard time dealing with. Subtlety and ambiguity are hard to judge on a scale from zero to ten. It’s hard to get a fix on the bottom line. I suddenly imagined Neustadt’s tombstone with the following epitaph engraved upon it: