Howard Engel - Getting Away With Murder

“Ed? Well, let me see …” He took a bite of his sandwich, as though that was a thought-aiding process and began to chew like a thoughtful Holstein. “He liked camping. Liked doing the same thing year after year. He got terribly upset if our regular trailer park was full or our normal spot was taken. He’d grumble about that. He liked habits. Habits made him comfortable. Every fall he put on his storm windows and every spring he’d take them down again and stack them in his garage. Do you know anybody who still does that, Mr. Cooperman? He took a lot of pride in his cars over the years. Did a lot of the servicing of them himself. Rotated the tires, put in antifreeze, changed the oil. It was a mark of pride with him. But also habit. Take the accident. Ed must have been the only man in town under a car last Sunday. I remember the day: sunny, but cold. First Sunday in March. ‘Steal a march on spring,’ he used to say. Freddy Tait and I used to kid him about that, as much as you could ever kid Ed Neustadt. Freddy never made a dime off him, you know. He did all his own servicing. His only hobby, really.”

“Do you know anyone who hated him enough to kill him?”

“Well the Tatarski family for a start. And there were other people in other cases where Ed marched right through the evidence to where he wanted to go. Most of the Tatarskis have gone, you know. Margaret took her own life down around Sarnia. Her brother, Freddy, was raised in foster homes after Margaret died. He came back here, though. By this time he called himself Fred Tait. Made a success of himself.”

“You mean the Nuts amp;Bolts car repair garages? What was he like, Freddy Tatarski?” The major suspended his soup spoon in mid-air in front of his face, while he considered what to say. I’d eaten my sandwich first too.

“Outwardly, he was a great success, like I said. Chamber of Commerce, Businessman of the Year, school trustee. But I got to know him through his drinking. Freddy was an alcoholic. I got him to join AA. Freddy was all torn up inside. Well, who wouldn’t be after losing both parents that way and after that his sisters? Then he came to me about something else. He had his drinking stopped by then. It was his daughter, Drina, he came about. He caught himself touching her and he wanted help. He had taken a strap to her. Couple of times. Said if he didn’t hurt her, he might do something worse. Wouldn’t see a doctor about it. I did what I could. But the girl moved away. That was a problem that solved itself.”

“This Drina, she wasn’t his real daughter, right?”

“That’s how he’d brought her up, no different from his own.”

“Was he a religious man?”

“At heart he was, but if we waited on people getting religion, we’d sit idle with our arms folded. That would never do. When the Almighty comes around, you want Him to find you busy. That’s why Salvationists are always on the move, up and doing.”

“So Fred Tait was a drunk and then a child abuser? And he came to you for help when it got too much for him. I wonder why?”

“That doesn’t surprise an old Salvationist like me, Mr. Cooperman. We’re an army family. Third generation. Freddy wasn’t the first and he won’t be the last. At the Sally Ann we take life as it comes. We’ve seen it at its best and worst. Poor Freddy was neither of those: just a poor blighter who started going through the sausage machine before he was fairly weaned.”

“Where was Drina during all this?”

“She was very close to her stepfather. Used to run around his repair shop like a regular grease monkey when she was in her teens. Drina was a bright girl, did well in high school and went out of town to university. But she quit. Don’t know why. She was in Toronto and New York for a couple of years. She married down in the States. Freddy never told me the details, or I forgot. Her husband, let me see, I think he died young, and she came back to try university again. She was nearly finished her first year when Freddy got his bad news. Cancer. That’s what took him. Big man like that. He weighed less than a hundred pounds when I buried him two years ago.”

“What happened to the girl after that?”

“She nursed him for a year. Tried to cheer him up. She was a good practical nurse. After that, she went away again. Somewhere in the States, but I might be wrong there. Heard she’d remarried. She might have gone out west. No, that was somebody else. Drina was a strange girl. Very strange.”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, I don’t think I can describe her. It was just a feeling I had about her. She reminded me a lot of her mother.”

“Freddy’s wife? Her stepmother?”

“No, Mr. Cooperman. Mary. Mary Tatarski. The one they hanged.”

Once reinstalled behind my desk, I examined the report I was writing for Wise. It was going well. I added information I had learned recently and worked away at it for another half-hour. A final detail was an invoice for services rendered up to and including Friday, March 11. That done, I walked across the street to the Print Shop to make copies. Back in the office, I took the top copy and put it in an envelope. Then, thinking of its confidential nature, I opened a bottom drawer and brought out a stick of red sealing wax with a wick running through it like a candle. I lit the wick and dribbled a pool of wax on the back of the envelope where the flap was stuck. It was very satisfying to watch the wax puddle and cool. I felt for a moment caught up in a profession as old as the pyramids, full of echoes of ancient Rome, Charles Dickens and Erle Stanley Gardner, all of which induced a welcome feeling of stability and well-being. After it had cooled a little, I impressed my signet ring into the red mass and, on trying to remove it, lost the bloodstone with its engraved “B.” I got it out with a paper-clip and blew out the sealing wax. Removing the ring from my finger, I parked the birthstone under the paper-clips in the top drawer.

When my handiwork was all ready to go, I returned to St. Andrew Street looking around for a sign of Mickey Armstrong or one of his merry men. The streets were hoodless, not a heavy in sight. I walked up St. Andrew Street a block, hoping to spot Phil or Sidney staring into windows of lingerie stores or babywear shoppes about three or four stores behind me. No luck. I was going to have to invest in a stamp and mail my report if I couldn’t find one of Wise’s happy runners.

Turning around, I walked west on the main street until I came to the Bernstein Travel Bureau. Inside, I found my old friend Laura behind the counter talking to customers bound for an early spring visit to Galway, Ireland. I hadn’t been in the store long before Phil Green came in behind me. He busied himself looking at the rack of brochures while I listened to Laura talk about the beauties of the West Country. Before she had me in her sights, while the ink was drying on her customers’ cheque on the counter, I turned to Phil and handed him the sealed envelope with instructions to take it directly to his boss without stopping to pass “Go.” Phil blinked at me, crunched a Lifesaver, and backed out the door, not quite understanding what had happened to him. As for Laura, we had a short chat, then I wandered across to the Di for a cup of coffee.

Sitting in my regular golden-stained booth and sipping deeply of the stuff that makes the world go around, I couldn’t keep from thinking of the report: small omissions, connections, suspicions. All in all, it was a peculiar case. Abe Wise was the spider in the middle of his web. All of the other people were ranged about him in some way. Whatever they did outside of their association with Wise was irrelevant to my inquiry. I’d talked to a lot of people. In fact this case was almost all talk. Questions and answers. Q and A. Then on to the next. Although I’d talked to lots of people about Wise, Wise wasn’t coming to life in a different way for me because of what I’d learned. Wise was the same guy to everybody. There wasn’t anything devious about him, which is a peculiar thing to say about a master crook. He had the system beat. He hadn’t changed much over the years. The Wise that Rogers had described to me was the Wise that Paulette used to wait on back in the 1950s, at this very table maybe.