Howard Engel - Getting Away With Murder

I wanted to tell Harvey that I suspected that my client might have murdered Neustadt, but I bit my tongue. Bad-mouthing clients is a hell of a way to get ahead. Pat Voisard joined us when the kettle boiled and we talked of general things. Pat told us what it was like growing up in the farming country outside town and going to school way out Pelham Road. Harvey treated us to some photographs taken on a recent skiing vacation. Before I left the architects’ office, Harvey asked me to call around again or to call if I had any fresh ideas on the Tatarski case. I told him I would.

I spent an hour or two trying to put down on paper what I’d discovered that might be of interest to Wise. It amounted to so little that I widened the margins on my typewriter to stretch out the text a little. Leaving a line blank between paragraphs helped too. It looked better that way from a design point of view.

My typing was interrupted twice, once by each of Wise’s offspring: Hart, returning my call as though we hadn’t already had words, and Julie, probably at her mother’s prompting. With Hart I made an appointment to see him at 9:00 P.M. that evening at a pub he goes to up near Secord University. That sounded promising for the prodigal son.

Julie was another matter. She’d telephoned to say that she didn’t want to talk to me.

“Why’d you call then? Because your mother asked you to?”

“You got it. I guess you’re a good detective, eh?”

“Would your father put up with less than the best?”

“Do you always answer a question with one?”

“Whenever I get a chance. You know that somebody’s trying to kill your old man?”

“I’ve been expecting to hear that he’s been murdered since before I had braces on my teeth. I used to have dreams about it. Every time I use an airport parking lot, I think that’s where Daddy’s going to be found in the trunk of a BMW.”

“I like your imagination, Julie.”

“Yeah, I’m not even telling you the good stuff. Mummy says that you’re a scrumptious bit, is she putting me on?”

“Mummy’s putting you on. And ‘scrumptious’ isn’t one of her expressions, is it?”

“I do like your voice. You’ve got a ballsy kind of voice. Bet you’re a Leo. Leo’s are unpredictable and sexy.”

“I’m pistachio. That’s what I always say.”

“What month were you born in?”

“Julie, I haven’t got time for this. If you want to see me, fine, we’ll pick a time. If you don’t want to see me it’s been nice talking to you.”

“How do you get off using my first name, Mr. Cooperman? I’m not a child.”

“You tell me what to call you, Julie, and I’ll write it down somewhere, okay? Have you any idea who wants to see your man dead?”

“Me, for one.”

“It’s a start. How come?”

“He’s a lousy father. When I was small, I never saw him. When I was a teenager, he wouldn’t let me alone.”

“Are you talking abuse?”

“I’m talking about his never letting me have any fun. He watched me like a hawk. Nobody was ever good enough for his precious Julie, so I sat home reading Vogue and Elle .”

“Is that why you married young? To get out of the house?”

“To get away from him! That’s dead on. The poor young shlump didn’t know I picked him just to drive Daddy crazy.”

“Did it work?”

“No. Daddy had it annulled before he’d figured out how to unhook my bra. I had better luck the second time. Are you still there, Mr. Cooperman?”

“Just. Why don’t you name a place where you want to eat your dinner and I’ll meet you there. I’ve got an office full of clients and my assistants can overhear everything we say.”

“I can’t do dinner. That’s out the window. Where will you be around one?”

“In the morning? I hope I’ll be in bed. What about tomorrow?”

“If you really want to see me, be at the Patriot Volunteer over the river at one. See yuh,” she said and hung up.

The Patriot Volunteer had a familiar ring to it. It was a roadhouse on the Lewiston-Youngstown road, a dance-hall and lounge that catered to locals from New York state and to Canadians who wanted to meet at a discreet distance from their own backyard. I had been there a few times years ago, but I had almost forgotten that it still existed.

I went back to my report wondering whether I was giving my client value for his money. I’d met with most of the people who have been important to him, I had uncovered no plot to send him to join his ancestors. If there was a plot, it was cleverer than I was. But I wrote it all down, all of the things I knew for sure and added the things I suspected. Even with wide margins, it didn’t fill a lot of paper.

* * *

It was some time later in the afternoon. The shadows had moved along the walls. I must have dozed off in my chair as I sometimes do. I blamed it on the lunch, which almost demanded a restorative nap on an oriental divan to get those rose-water flavoured sweets out of the system. I say I had been asleep, but I wasn’t asleep when it happened. When it happens in the movies, it makes a bigger bang. All I heard was the sound of a thud in the wall. That was followed immediately by the noise of shattering glass. A mug, left on top of the filing cabinet just over my left shoulder, was suddenly in pieces both there and on the floor. A fine shower of glass from my window covered the papers in front of me. I dropped to the floor as a second shot came through the window. I pulled the phone down with me and called 911. I told the dispatcher that I was being shot at from across the street; the Russell House was the best bet, I said, but I wasn’t about to examine the view from the window too closely. I could see two tidy holes in my window now. The second shot had buried itself in the metal filing cabinet with a loud ping. But the big noise must have been across the street. As the target, I wasn’t being treated to either sound or light.

Whoever was doing the shooting must have been on the run already. He couldn’t be sure he missed me with that second shot, because I hit the floor at almost the same moment it came through the window. He would have to get out of the hotel fast. If this was the same person who took a shot at Wise, he was still not getting close enough to do any damage. No professional hitman could get away with this amateurish approach.

I crawled along the floor in the direction of my door, pulled my coat down and upset the stand as I overbalanced it. The crash to the floor was the loudest noise of the whole encounter. I pulled my coat after me into Dr. Bushmill’s office next door. Frank was a chiropodist, a scholar and a friend. He’d taken lumps on his head on my behalf more than once. In the waiting room there were two middle-aged women and a young mother with a little boy with a tear-stained face. I rushed in and looked out from the window farthest from my own. The hotel stood where it always had. The shot had come from almost directly across the street, from a second- or third-floor window. I wanted to rush down the stairs and across the street, but the gun could even now be trained on the front door of my building. I raked the second-floor windows with my eyes. One window was open, the rest were closed. The floor above looked deserted. I watched the street door of the hotel. Nobody came out. Nobody on the street had stopped. Nobody was looking up at my windows.

“What! Benny? What brings you here?” It was Frank Bushmill.

“Sorry to intrude, Frank, but I wanted to look out your window.” I didn’t want to mention shooting or bullets from across the street. I was pretty sure that it wasn’t a random shooting nut that had fired at me. That meant that Frank’s clients were in no danger. They were sitting with their backs to a safe wall anyway.