Howard Engel - The Suicide Murders

The western part of the city is cut off from the rest of it by a canal to the north, dirty and full of nasty concoctions brewed in the papermills a few miles up the valley; and to the west by the river-sized stream called the Eleven Mile Creek. Except for the mansion of the chief mover and entrepreneur of the canal, built in the 1840s, this side of town has nothing to shout about. Most of the houses stand on small lots on narrow streets named after dead British colonial bigwigs. They are frame bungalows mostly with a few brick veneer specimens from time to time, and a sprinkling of pebble-dashed stucco. The coming of diesel did little to lift the grime of a century of coal-dust in the backyards along the right of way of the Hamilton-Buffalo line. Each of the houses presents either faded blinds or curtains to the outsider and all of them offer a generous veranda or porch to the inaccurate aim of the Beacon delivery boy.

Martha Tracy’s house backed on the tracks, but put up a brave front in the form of a well-cropped privet hedge along the walk. It was stucco, with black and white pebble dash, and had a green-painted wooden porch. The second step needed fixing. My knock rattled the screen door, so I tried to get at the inside door, but it was fastened with a hook. I rattled it again. Soon I could hear footsteps approaching. The doors opened and I was looking at a woman of fifty, stocky, blonde and with a Churchillian chin.

“You Cooperman?” she said. I nodded. She unhooked the door and invited me down the dim hall, past glimpses of an unmade bed through a doorway on my right to the bright kitchen. “I’ve got coffee, if you don’t mind instant,” she said and found two mugs inverted on the drainboard.

“I want you to know that I’m not from the police.”

“I’ve had a belly-full of them, I’ll tell you,” she said, raising her eyebrow significantly. “I don’t know how so many people can ask the same dumb questions so many times.” I hoped that my questions were better. Of course they were. I didn’t get them out of a book.

“Well, I hope that these questions won’t take up too much of your time.”

“Time. Heck, I’ve got nothing but time. There’s no job to do until they decide what they’re going to do with me, so I’ll be on sick leave for a week anyway. And it was a shock, you know. I’d been with him for more than five years. They always say, ‘Ask Martha. She knows where all the bodies are buried.’”

“And do you?”

“Well, that’s forthright! You’re doing fine. Maybe, to save you time I should tell you that I was the last person to see Mr. Yates alive. I left at five to five. It had been a scorcher and everybody took off when I yelled ‘Quittin’ time.’ I always yell that; it’s an office joke. But usually it’s closer to five.”

“Was he alone when you left?”

“M’yeah.”

“Was his bar open? Did he have a drink going?”

“You know Chester pretty well, don’t you? Right, he often had a drink on the way by five, but that day, Thursday, he had been out most of the afternoon, and only got back to the office at quittin’ time so he shot himself with an unclouded brain, if that’s what your little head is thinking.”

“When the police got through with their investigation, did you notice anything missing from the office?”

“You should get points off for hinting to the witness. There was a bar towel gone.”

“Anything else?”

“That’s all. Do I get a free trip to Los Angeles if I hit the right answer? It should be easy: I outfitted that bar myself, got the set of eight glasses from Birks, kept the bar stocked …”

“… and the books dusted?” She grinned at me a lopsided friendly grin that was half shrug.

“As far as you know, he hadn’t planned to meet anyone after five?”

“Search me. He sometimes did, but he never told me half of what was going on.”

“Speaking of knowing what was going on, did you ever hear him say anything about ‘C2’?”

“‘C2’? What’s that?”

“I think it was something on his mind. He doodled a ‘C’ with a two and I wondered whether it meant anything to you. It doesn’t click?” She shook her head.

“Nope,” she said.

“As you know, the police are calling Mr. Yates’ death a suicide. Did you think that he was at the edge? Was he all that depressed as the papers are saying?”

“That’s leading the witness again. You should learn the rules. But no. Between me and you and the gatepost, Chester wasn’t depressed enough to kill himself. He had had a lot of business worries during recent weeks, but that man loved living too much to go and shoot himself. He was in a corner of some kind, but he was more the type to worm his way out of it, or change the rules, or something, than to take the way out he took. I thought I knew him pretty well, but that just shows to go you, doesn’t it?”

“Ms. Tracy …”

“Call me Miss Tracy. I’m a Miss not a Ms. I’m not one of those women’s libbers.”

“Miss Tracy, then, I want to thank you for being so helpful.”

“You’re breaking my heart. I told you I haven’t anything else to do, except try to find a hat to wear to the funeral on Monday. I used to have one around here someplace. Oh, well. Now, before you get on your high horse and hightail it out of here, what’s all of this in aid of? Who are you working for? You beating the bushes for Bill Ward?”

“Why do you think I might be working for him?”

“William Allen Ward moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.”

“And …?”

“Well, I’ve never seen him ask any questions, so I always guessed that he had other people collecting answers for him. He’s organized that way, if you know what I mean.” I had finished my coffee and had memorized the view of her long rectangle of backyard visible through the kitchen window. We both got up and she walked me to the front door. “You think that there’s something that’s not kosher about Chester’s suicide, Mr. Cooperman, if you’ll pardon the expression?”

“Miss Tracy, I don’t know.” I shifted my weight and held the screen door open.

“Somebody did the bugger in, eh? Well, it figures. It could make very good sense, Mr. Cooperman. Goodbye, and let me know how you make out.”

“I will,” I shouted over my shoulder as I went down the walk to my Olds at the curb.

I drove across the CN tracks on a rickety wooden bridge and kept on past more stucco fronts and kids playing jacks and marbles in the sunshine out Pelham Road. Beyond the rooftops, the ridge of the escarpment hogged the horizon, with the green water tower on the edge commanding the best view of the city below. The creek valley followed me out on my left. Gradually the curbing came to an end, the houses gave way to deserted farms and acre upon acre of former vineyards, all cultivating real estate signs. Occasionally, the stream below curved, and I could catch the glint of it in the sun. After a couple of miles of this, I could see the ten blue pipes running down the scarp to the creek. It was a domesticated

Niagara Falls, where nearly the same amount of water fell nearly as many feet as the famous cataract, but encased in steel, so it was a wash-out as a tourist attraction. Nobody was interested in falling water as long as it was in pipes.

Zekerman had his name stencilled on his mailbox in such good taste I nearly drove by his gate. It was a big, rambling house, what they still call “ranch style” in the area even if it rises to two floors. There were three cars in the carport, which was an extension of the line of the green roof. I drove up his lane and blocked at least two of the cars from getting out. There was an Audi and two Mercedes-Benzs.

I got out of the car, stretched my back muscles and walked up to the aluminum screen door. A red-faced woman with tortured red hair answered the bell, and told me that the doctor was down at the potting shed by the creek or in the shed behind the house. I thanked her and walked around the left side of the house, past half a dozen green garbage bags stuffed with the outlines of cans and cartons, and a sick-looking Irish wolfhound with swollen joints in his legs. He gave me a quarter-hearted wag of his tail, then went back to his worries. By now I could hear Zekerman, or somebody, making a racket in the aluminum-sided shed. In the gloom at the far end, he was bashing a piece of machinery on a workbench.