Howard Engel - The Suicide Murders

“I must have walked for two days without sleeping. I won’t bother trying to describe what it was like. If I hadn’t gone through the experience of being crazy, I would have nothing to compare it with. Eventually, I stumbled on to the highway about a mile above where we’d left the car. As I climbed into the driver’s seat, I locked the door behind me and fell into a deep sleep. When I woke, it was dark, but the moon was full. I remember seeing Liz’s bag lying in the moonlight on the passenger’s seat. I think that that was when I realized that I wasn’t going to report Liz’s death. I knew that it was a gift of fate or something. It was Liz’s gift to me. She’d been dearer to me than anyone I’d known after my sister. To her, I’d been the family she’d never known. And now she was giving me the tools I needed to complete my mission.

“From that day, I became Liz Tilford. I cancelled the apartment, mentioned vaguely in a couple of places that she’d gone to live in the Sault with a married sister, and moved first back here to my mother’s house in order to make my plans. I knew that my time was limited. Someone would find the tent in the woods. Someone would suspect something from the uncashed pension cheques. I knew that I had to act quickly, and I did.”

Hilda Blake paused in her story, giving me a smile that mingled both pride and sweetness. It was with difficulty that I kept myself from identifying with her. I found I was silently cheering when circumstances made her task easier and damning the obstacles to her revenge. She had made herself totally the weapon of her hate, and yet she remained somehow uncorrupted by it. Her account was precise and unaffected. She was incredibly calm.

The afternoon shadows were lengthening. I was beginning to be glad I had my jacket. Hilda held her elbows with the opposite hands. She sighed a little. “Ben, I’ve been talking far too long. It’s your turn. Tell me how I did it.”

I hadn’t expected to be challenged so directly, as if this was some television play or a party game. But these last few days had been full of surprises. Did I honestly expect Hilda Blake to behave like anybody else? I kept telling myself that she was as crazy as a tailor with two customers and one pair of pants. If I wasn’t careful, I thought, I could fall into her vision and get lost.

“You came back to Grantham a year ago, the end of March, beginning of April. For some reason, maybe it was habit, maybe something they’d said to you in the hospital, you decided to see a therapist. You were certain, and sure of your mission, or destiny, but you wanted to be sure that you would remain well enough to execute your design. I don’t know how you happened to pick Dr. Andrew Zekerman.”

“I tried three others and couldn’t get an appointment. Then I tried him.” From the way she said “him,” I could tell that she didn’t like this part of the story.

““Zekerman found you a fascinating patient, but not for the reasons you might guess. He discovered in the story you told him about your past certain unprofessional interests of his own. He began to take you over and over the same ground. He wanted to know all about what happened at Secord University.”

“He told me that it was to make me accept what had happened.” There was a tremor in her voice for the first time. She was agitated by Zekerman’s presence in the story.

“Dr. Zekerman was a blackmailer. You were a source that gave him information about two people who were rich enough to make him find the practice of psychiatry dull and unrewarding. He used what you told him, and what his own research turned up, to squeeze a lot of money from both Yates and Ward. And he was about to try for higher stakes.” Hilda’s hand had gone involuntarily to her throat. The clear skin of her cheeks and neck coloured. At first I thought that since Zekerman’s schemes had nothing to do with hers, she could feel normal outrage for the victims. But the look on her face was closer to anger or anxiety.

“He nearly spoiled everything. I didn’t know why he pushed himself in uninvited. It still bothers me to think about the way he tried to confuse and change what I had to do. He was just greedy, as you say, he had no special purpose as I had.”

“As Elizabeth Tilford you applied for a job in Chester Yates’ office. He took you on. That put you close to Chester so that you could watch his every move. You discovered that he kept a loaded target pistol in his cupboard, and that he enjoyed a drink at the end of the day from his hidden bar.”

“He boasted about being an expert shot,” she said. “Anything Bill couldn’t do, Chester gloried in.”

“The job put you in the right place to be noticed by Bill Ward, who could never resist a pretty face. He invited you out. You played up to him, flattered his vanity, laughed at his jokes.”

“Do you despise me for that?” She was sitting straight in her chair now, challenging, her red hair quite dark in the failing light.

“I don’t come into this at all. I’m just an investigator. I’m no judge or jury.”

“You think it was a low trick to take advantage of them that way. I can tell. But I sacrificed myself as well as them. You must see that?”

“All I can see is that you let Ward make love to you on and off for two months in his little place on Bellevue Terrace, while you studied the way the locks worked and discovered the best way to cut through the hedges and back lanes, all for future reference.

“In order to be free to move as you chose, you thought it best to disappear from the office. You left just after Chester warned you that he would have to let you go. You’d nearly finished with the Liz Tilford identity anyway. But people like Martha Tracy remembered you. Martha tried to be your friend. But you didn’t have time for that. You were getting ready for your job by reading about how Brutus killed Caesar for the good of Rome, how Medea sacrificed her children for the good of her self-respect, and how Charlotte Corday assassinated Marat for the good of France. You saw yourself in a noble tradition, not just a murderer, but a dedicated avenger. Your own sacrifice was part of the mission from the beginning.

“You picked Chester first. You went to the building a little after five that Thursday afternoon. You hoped to find him there having a drink at the end of the business day. You knew that your sudden reappearance would spark his interest enough for him to drop whatever business lay on the desk in front of him.”

“He was surprised to see me. He got up and invited me in, quizzed me about where I’d been hiding. He offered me a drink, but I said I’d get one for both of us. Chester liked to be well looked after.”

“You used the bar towel so you only touched the glasses. You put something into Chester’s drink that you’d brought with you. Chloral hydrate is the usual stuff in detective stories, but you’d been talking to Liz Tilford. Maybe she told you that knock-out drops aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Maybe she told you about the new short-acting barbiturates. Something like secobarb would be just the thing. You’d be taking a chance that someone might order a full-scale post mortem. The drug would turn up fast enough in a toxicology examination, or if samples of the tissues were sent to the Forensic Centre. But by now you were taking a lot of chances.

“You brought him his drink, and watched the drug take hold. As soon as he passed out, you went to the cupboard, picked up the gun with the towel, and pressed it into Chester’s right hand. You placed his finger in the trigger guard, lifted the gun to his head and applied a little pressure to his finger. It was easy. Now all you had to do was put the towel-wrapped glasses in your bag. You took the stairs to get out, I think, and you’d been clear of the building for half an hour when the security man came into Chester’s office looking for a free drink.” I didn’t know how I was managing to tell Hilda all this without taking a smoke. I guess that looking at her taking all this from me was intoxication enough.