Howard Engel - The Suicide Murders

She was wearing a soft blue cotton dress with buttons and a collar. The brilliant sunlight caught it, and her long red hair, hanging loose; she seemed to glow as she leaned back in the old-fashioned canvas lawn chair. Beside her on a white wicker table was a full crystal pitcher of lemonade, with the condensation forming droplets which ran down the sides. Around her, the garden was blooming with the enthusiasm of early spring. I don’t know the names of the flowers; irises, maybe, and crocuses. They were all there, in spite of the marauding shadow of the water tower which once a day must brood over these flowerbeds. At this hour, the great green shadow was elsewhere, and the picture in front of me could not have been more idyllic if it was in some English garden in a painting. Except for the far end of the yard. There, the escarpment dropped away suddenly. At my eye level, I could see a hawk turning, a hundred feet above the rooftops of the city below.

I walked around and stood in her light. She lifted her hand to her face. “You’re blocking the sun, Mr. Cooper-man. Come over here and sit beside me so that we can both enjoy it.” I settled into another lawn chair, and brought it closer to Hilda Blake. “I’ve been expecting you,” she said. “I thought that you’d come this morning.” I grinned, helplessly. “You met my mother?”

“Yes, I just saw her.”

“She’s been very good to me.”

“Does she know, then?”

“Oh, of course not. Her support was of a general kind. I’m surprised if you thought, even for a moment, that I could have shared my task with anyone, even Mother. She’s really a very strong person, though, complex and special like the rest of the family. Can you imagine anyone named Blake keeping birds in cages?” I tried to match the smile she tossed me. “He said ‘Everything that lives is holy.’ Do you believe that, Mr. Cooperman?”

“I guess I do, in a way,” I said, a little out of my depth.

“I used to believe it with all my heart.” She looked at me with her green eyes very round. The sun had illuminated the golden flecks in them and the blue vein in her forehead was throbbing. “Yes,” she said, looking out away from me. “I used to believe that and a hundred other beautiful things that I have had to put behind me. I’m cut off from fine sentiments now, but I feel the wound.”

“Why don’t you tell me about it?”

“Oh yes, I will. And you are going to tell me things as well. But first, may I pour you something cool?”

“Thank you very much.” She filled two of the tall glasses on the tray from the pitcher, the ice cubes protesting like distant chimes, and handed one of the glasses to me. I let her sip her drink before I began to drink mine, a delay that she noticed and smiled at.

“Please give me a little credit, Mr. Cooperman. I’m not that sort of person. Do you really think I intend to poison you?” I felt like a schoolboy caught cheating in an exam.

“Well, you must admit that I might have reason to be cautious.”

“I wouldn’t do anything now that would spoil what I’ve done. You are not part of my mission, Mr. Cooper-man.” She looked at me like she was explaining why she’d failed to castle early in a simple king’s pawn game. Her mission. I had to concentrate on the men she’d put in the cemetery.

“Tell me, I said. “Tell me about before you had a mission.” She looked over the edge of the escarpment; for a moment I thought she hadn’t heard me. There were two hawks wheeling now, slowly in great circles.

“It began such a long time ago. Try to imagine it, sitting here in this garden where we spent so much of our time. My grandfather built the brick shed over there. He used to raise mink. The old house on the property belonged to his father’s farm. It was one hundred and fifty years old, but it had to be destroyed when the land was subdivided. My sister told me stories of the old house, how she’d played in the rafters under the roof, or crept from one bedroom to another through two closets that joined. Granddad worked, when he was younger, for the canal company as a lock-keeper. He filled Elizabeth with canal lore, and she passed it on to me. One time he showed her where an abandoned railway tunnel, nearly a quarter of a mile long, ran under a basin between two locks on the old canal. This morning I caught myself thinking that now I’ll be free to look for that place. It’s fascinated me since I first heard of it as a child. I was forgetting your visit, Mr. Cooperman.” The smile that nearly didn’t make it at all faded quickly from her eyes. She went on with the story.

“The city made Father sell off the mink Granddad left. They tried to force him to take down the shed, but he convinced them that it had historical interest.”

“Your sister was special, wasn’t she?”

“Oh, yes. But that doesn’t really tell half of it. We were close, of course. Even though I was younger, I tried to keep up with her. Elizabeth was a first-class student all her life. I think she was a genius. She was always right up there with the top three. And then, suddenly, without any warning, she wasn’t there any more. She was only twenty, Mr. Cooperman. She had so much to give to life, and they spoiled it. They murdered her.” Her face had coloured during the last part of this. She paused thoughtfully, forgetting that she had company, and sipped from her glass.

“You knew that she was taking drugs, didn’t you?” I asked, trying to bring the real Elizabeth Blake back again.

“Yes, but she was never an addict. Youthful experiment, maybe. Everybody was doing it then. It seemed natural, a part of growing up. Don’t you see?”

“Oh, I see all right. But I also see that she was more than an innocent victim of the pushers. She was one of the pushers herself.”

“Elizabeth was good, and honest, not a bit like what you are thinking. If you’d known her …”

“Hilda, you knew she was involved in that drug ring. She knew who was making the drugs; she helped distribute them. She was there when the security guard was wounded. With the gun you gave me.”

“I remember that night.” She was leaning forward with her hands on her cheeks. “I was doing homework in my dressing-gown with the roses. She came into my room; I could see from her face that something was terribly wrong. She rushed over and held me for a long time.” Hilda stopped speaking like she’d suddenly caught a high note in her ear and she couldn’t go on until the vibration ended.

“Hilda? Tell me about the gun.”

“The gun?”

“The one Elizabeth brought home. The one you got me to take to Ward’s house.” She was frowning at me slightly, as though she’d just suddenly noticed that I was selling magazine subscriptions. When I asked a question, I got a vague response. We danced around that way for a while, and then the note, or vibration, or whatever it was, must have gone away. She picked up the story again with a half apologetic smile.

“She cried and cried in my arms. We’d never been so close. She’d never needed me before. For a while it was as if she was me and I was her. All the while, she was babbling. Most of it I didn’t catch. But I recognized names: Joe, Bill and Chester. I heard about a gun that went off, that someone was hurt. Elizabeth went back for the gun. Bill Ward had dropped it. She was bone-white with fright. I held her close until morning.” Hilda looked little and crushed in her chair.

“But, Hilda, the gun?”

“The gun?” She looked away from my face. “Oh, I just kept it.”

“Was Elizabeth in love with Joe Corso?”

“Joe was the only one who did anything. The rest was sordid business. Joe had discovered how to make things in the lab. He could do anything. He was brilliant.”