Howard Engel - The Suicide Murders

“Tell the story.”

“Well, soon I noticed that all my friends had paired off and I was the only one still playing the field. The field was Chester. So, to make a long story short, we started getting serious. We were married, we had a child, a girl, Ellen, who is in a home. She’s severely retarded. We didn’t have any other children. Chester came from a good family, and let his father set him up in his factory. But Chester had always liked machines and trucks, and soon he bought one and rented it out to a contractor. In a year or two he had a number of trucks doing excavation work mostly. It grew to be a fleet of them and Chester and I moved from the west end to a place on South Ridge. He left his father’s job and got into the real estate boom at the end of the sixties. I guess he had a piece of every deal around. He had the big earthmoving machines by then. Is this any help?” she asked, her eyes rounded.

“Take your time.”

“I guess we were never a deeply loving couple, Mr. Cooperman. I was fond of Chester. He was always good to me. And we went through a lot with Ellen together. He was a dependable, open sort of person. He had no secrets, he never called me out for trespassing, if you know what I mean. Then, recently, beginning a couple of month ago, that changed. He started getting moody, secretive, and that’s when the lies started.”

“The lies?”

“I discovered it by accident to start with. Then I confess to checking up on him. I phoned the office on a Thursday afternoon about something. Two months ago. His secretary told me that Chester was over at City Hall meeting with Vern Harrington. Well, I know Vern and Doris quite well, and I thought that what I had on my mind-I forget now what it was-was important. So I phoned Vern’s office and there wasn’t a meeting at all. Chester hadn’t been there and wasn’t expected. Vern thought I was checking up on my husband. We both laughed. That night I mentioned Vern-not that I’d phoned or anything, but just that I’d been thinking about him and Doris-and he didn’t turn a hair. That’s not like Chester. He usually gets beet red if somebody says ‘brassière.’ His face doesn’t hide much. One week later I called again about something and I was told that he was keeping a dentist appointment. Again that night I mentioned that I should see my dentist, and he let that sail right past without comment. He wasn’t at the dentist’s I’m sure. I got more and more suspicious and I began phoning or stopping by the office when I was out shopping and discovered that most of the times he wasn’t there the reason given was a lie. Do you think I’m being silly, Mr. Cooperman? Have I been watching too much television? I don’t want to be the last to know if he’s been playing around. What do you think I should do?”

I wish about then that I had a pipe to use as a prop. I needed something to enhance my dignity: a streak of gray at the temples, fifteen thousand dollars in the bank, that sort of thing-just so she’d know everything was going to be all right. I shifted myself around in my swivel chair and leaned back. I knew just how far I could go before I had to pick myself up off the floor. She was still asking me questions with her big gray eyes.

“Well, it may not turn out to be as mysterious as it looks, Mrs. Yates. There are hundreds of things he might be doing without endangering the sanctity of your marriage. My father, for instance, for years was a secret gin rummy player. He used to take two-hour lunches and when he got back to the store had to duck out to the United Cigar Store for a sandwich. My mother caught up with him in the end, but they celebrated their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary recently.” I waited for the anecdote to take hold and then made a suggestion. “Tell you what I’ll do, let me nose around a little and report back to you in a couple of days. If I turn up anything interesting, we can have another talk. If it’s just business or something like gin rummy, then you’ll have to take my word for it when I say ‘Don’t lose any more sleep.’ How does that sound? If you like it, it’s going to cost you a hundred a day, say for three days, if it takes me that long, and expenses.”

She pulled her handbag open and put fifteen twenty-dollar bills on my blotter. I put the money in my billfold without actually jumping across the desk and hugging her. Since the first of March when I had to put up my annual licence fee, a nick out of my almost non-existent income adding up to five hundred dollars, things hadn’t been lively around the office. I’d traced a runaway couple to Buffalo, I’d found evidence that the poor abandoned Mrs. Furstenberg was getting a big one on the side every month from a former basketball all-star. And I’d taken on a lot of crazy things that I shouldn’t have of course. I could do worse than spend a few days tailing Chester Yates. A guy like that goes into a lot of fancy places in a day.

“Tell me, Mrs. Yates,” I said, wagging my star sapphire ring in her direction, “have the absences of your husband formed any sort of pattern? Have you been able to anticipate when he is going to be away without leave?”

“Yes. It’s always a Thursday and always after lunch, from around two-thirty to four-thirty. Sometimes he doesn’t come back to the office.”

“Fine.”

“Mr. Cooperman, today is Thursday. I wonder, could you see where he goes this afternoon?”

“As a matter of fact, Mrs. Yates, I’m going to move some other files off my desk for a few days and concentrate on this one. Where is your husband’s office?”

“It’s on the seventh floor of the Caddell Building.”

“That’s on Queen Street?”

“No, James.”

“Oh, near the market.”

“Further down.”

“Well, don’t worry. I’ll find it all right. When I have anything to tell you, how do you want me to get in touch?”

“You may call me at home. I’m there all day most days.”

“Right. That’s in the book is it?”

“It’s unlisted. I’d better give it to you.” She gave me the number which I added to the doodles on my yellow pad, then I got up with what in a taller man would signal that the interview was concluded. Since she remained seated, I walked around my desk and took her hand. It was a strong and determined grip, which she released with one of her puppeteer smiles. “I’ll hear from you, then,” she said turning. I beat her to the door.

“Yes. And in the meantime, let me do the worrying.”

I listened to her receding footsteps down the stairs to the street, and looked at my watch. It was nearly noon. I had a couple of hours to kill until I had to pick up my man at the Caddell Building.

It was two-thirty, and the day had turned from hot to hotter. I was flipping through a pile of paperbacks in a bookstore with a clear view across the street to the big glass doors of the Caddell Building. In my pocket was an eight-and-a-half-by-ten glossy of Chester Yates in a hard-hat shaking hands with the mayor, also wearing a hard-hat and with a vote-getting grimace. Both of them managed to look as though wearing hard-hats wasn’t regularly part of their day. Chester wore a three-piece out-oftown suit. His big frame needed all the help a tailor could give it. At about two-forty, just when I was getting re-acquainted with Miss Wonderly on page five of The Maltese Falcon , Chester came out the double doors and blinked in the sunlight. He wasn’t wearing a hat, but I thought I might be able to follow his blond head through a crowd anyway.

I let him go about a half a block ahead of me. I thought I could keep tabs on him without endangering the backs of his imported brown shoes. He didn’t look around once. From behind, as he wove in and out of the pedestrians and waiting at the end of the block for the light to change, he looked like an ex-football player going to flab gently. He wasn’t carrying a lot of beer fat on him, but his muscles were turning to marmalade. We were back on St. Andrew Street again, heading west, with the one-way traffic on the main street running against us.