Howard Engel - Getting Away With Murder

“A heavy snow is rare this late in the season,” Frank observed. Snow? I hadn’t even noticed.

I gathered my coat and carried it to the back of the building, where I climbed down the fire-escape for the first time in over fifteen years. It was snowing all right, whitening everything in sight, and making the rusty stairs treacherous but not a bit quieter.

My office backed on a ravine leading down to a textile mill, so I had a longer way to go down than I realized. At the rear, my office was four floors up. I didn’t worry about all the irrelevant garbage going through my head. It was the voice of shock or panic or something. I just had to listen and keep moving.

I walked up the incline of the alley between my building and the bank next door. I still couldn’t hear sirens. And there was a noise behind me.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Benny, what’s afoot?” It was Frank. He must have bounded down the fire-escape after me. I don’t remember hearing him.

“Frank, somebody in the Russell House just put two bullets through my window.” Frank’s snow-bedecked eyebrows rose to his hairline.

“No! You’ve called the garda? The cops, I mean?”

“They’re taking a hell of a long time getting here!” Great fat flakes were falling silently between us as we shot at them with steaming breath.

“Thanks for not frightening my pigeons. I’d better get back to them, unless I can help. I left Mrs. Sampson with her foot soaking. I’d best pull her out. God bless,” he said and was gone down the alley again, slipping and sliding, to Mrs. Sampson’s bunions.

When I looked again across St. Andrew Street, there were two cruisers parked in front of the James Street door of the hotel’s pub. One man sat in the front seat of the closest cruiser. Pedestrians seemed unaware of the situation; they came out of stores and crossed the street with the lights and against the lights as usual, their heads tucked in against the weather. After a minute, three men in uniform came out the pub door. A passer-by laughed to her friend at this, and said something that set them both giggling. I was watching them when I also caught a glimpse of the skinheaded hood who sat beside me on my drive to see Wise last Monday morning. It was him all right, tattoos, earrings, the works. I’d know his blue skin anywhere. Was he the shooter? Or was it just his turn to play minder? The three cops conferred with the driver of the cruiser, who pointed across at my office. My minder, the skinhead, melted into the late-shopping crowd along St. Andrew Street. The three uniforms crossed through the one-way traffic. I met them at the street door.

“Hello,” I said. “My name’s Cooperman. The shots came into my office from across the street in the hotel.”

“We better have a look,” one of them said.

“Sure, the bullets will wait for you. But what about the shooter? Don’t you think you should search the hotel?”

“Look, Mr. Cooperman. The hotel is semi-closed down. There are repair people all over the place. We found the room where the shot was fired from …” As he said this, another cop waved a clear plastic bag with two long brass casings inside. “A carpenter said that a guy wearing a heavy parka came through the hall carrying a sports bag. He went out of the pub entrance three minutes before we showed up. So what’s the percentage running all over town, when we can phone in a description from upstairs while we look at the holes in your wall.”

Since there was no chance to catch the sniper on the run, I did the next best thing: I invited the uniforms upstairs. Here they marked the bullet holes with a magic marker for the next batch of cops, and tried to line up the two window holes and the marked circles. We all could see that they ran straight across the street to the partly open window. I could see a shape in the room, which made me alert the cops, but the figure waved back when the three with me waved across the street.

By the time I’d talked to a young officer and told him that the sniper could have been a whole filing case full of former clients and their disaffected spouses, Niagara Regional wiped its hands of me. I was cautioned to be careful. It was suggested that I get out of town for a few days. I thought of having them forward that request to my employer. The forensic team turned out to be one man, who looked like a telephone repairman. He gouged one of the bullets from the wall and showed me where the other had chewed its way through several dozen files in a drawer, doing the sort of damage you might blame on a hungry gerbil.

When the office was clear, I went next door again, where Frank poured me a tumbler full of Irish whiskey with his own name on the bottle. I wanted to ask him about that, but I didn’t have the energy. I downed my medicine and took another shot. Both neat. Soon my hands stopped trembling. By then, the calm voice in my head, the one that is so maddeningly serene in emergencies, had gone away to bother another creature in panic. All I wanted to do now was find a place to have the other half of my interrupted nap. Frank helped out here too. “I’ll leave you the rest of this, Benny. There’s a pillow and a blanket in the cupboard.” I don’t know what he did with his last patients and I didn’t ask. He clicked his office door’s spring catch and told me to close it after me when I left. I helped myself to another ounce from the bottle he’d left, then curled up on his couch and fell asleep. I slept covered by my coat until well after dark.

The road that wound its way up the Escarpment to Secord University was the road I practised on for my driving test many years ago. It was narrow, curving and steep, and, remarkably, totally unchanged in twenty years. There are all sorts of intersections that are carved up regularly by the Department of Public Works, intersections that offer a clear view on all sides. I wasn’t complaining. God knows there’s little enough of my home town left the way it used to be.

That night, this familiar hill was thick with snow, and slush. The evening rush hour hadn’t cleared much of a path; it just made the climb slower. No salt or gravel had been scattered to make our way easier. I could see tracks where a car had applied too much brake coming down. The car could just be seen off to the side in a thicket of saplings. To my right, as I came safely to the top, lay Secord University, named after the heroic wife who brought news of a forthcoming battle to the British officer whose headquarters were not much farther down the road. There was a commemorative plaque attached to the ruins of the house containing the ambiguous information that Laura Secord spent three nights under this roof with Lieutenant (later Colonel) Fitzgibbon.

The university was housed in one huge tower sitting on the edge of the Escarpment, where it beamed the virtues of higher education to the hundreds of thousands of people living on the plain below (to say nothing of those in passing lake boats).

Smart Alex was a watering-hole for undergraduates. The decor and atmosphere, as well as the crowd, spoke loudly of early cynicism and idealistic values twisted around a pretzel. The beer was fairly cheap and available on draught. The circular room was divided into curved areas on two or three levels, with a long bar running along one side for those who were looking for a listener. The space was punctuated with relics from the past: figureheads, anchors, gum machines, penny scales and old-fashioned business signs.

I sat down on a stool and ordered a draught of the local Grindstone lager and waited. It was still about seven minutes to nine. I watched, by way of the mirror behind the bar, three young women with short hair being sandwiched between crew-cut linemen or their look-alikes. They were all having a great time ordering burgers and potato skins. When one of them caught sight of a sign that read “bust developer,” the young woman who least needed this sort of therapy began pounding the nearest male on his chest. They all thought it was very funny. Glasses of beer were emptied as the food was consumed and new glasses appeared to replace them.