Howard Engel - The Suicide Murders

“I think that it was on the day of Chester’s funeral, you kept an appointment with Dr. Zekerman. Zekerman knew nothing about Liz Tilford or her disappearance. Hilda Blake had never disappeared. You saw that he was frightened. Chester’s death upset him so much that he was even afraid of you. He told you about sending a few choice items out of your past to a private investigator who had bothered him on the weekend. There are even fewer private investigators in Grantham that there are shrinks. Maybe he boasted my name.”

“He did. He ranted about how he’d insured his life. He didn’t accuse me, he just talked.” She was rubbing her wrists automatically. Zekerman had a way of doing it to her.

“You couldn’t be sure what it was he sent me, but you knew that you had to try to get it back before you turned your full attention to Ward. I don’t know where you got the name Phoebe Campbell. I suspect it goes back to the hospital.”

“She was a patient; she still is, she still is.”

“The details about the job at the bank were very convincing, as was the brunette wig. It took me a long time to see that your green and rust outfit had been chosen to go with red hair, not brown.”

The light had started to fade from the sky, and the city below the escarpment was debating with itself whether it was dark enough to turn on the streetlights. When I was a boy, I used to try to have my eyes glued to the lights on our street so that I could see them go on all at once. I remembered that and the fact that I was never looking at the right moment.

“You came to my office with a ruse to get me out of the way so that you would have time to look for whatever Zekerman had sent me. As you discovered, he hadn’t sent me much, a few indecipherable pages of routine notes. But I’m glad you didn’t get this,” I said, reaching into my breast pocket and showing her the picture of two little girls in their kilts. She took the picture from me and looked at it for a long time.

“May I have it now?” she asked, trying to disguise the urgency of the request. I nodded. I wouldn’t need it any more. And I didn’t think that at this point Hilda Blake would begin destroying evidence. She propped the picture against the side of the pitcher, which was now only a third full. By now it had grown too cool for cool drinks.

“By giving me the gun that had been used to wound the security guard, you were putting something incriminating into Ward’s house. I was stupid not to see that you’d switched parcels. You knew that I wouldn’t take a package with unknown contents around the block without looking first. You wanted me to be detained at the house while you went through my office. You had to do it that way because there’s no telling when I’m likely to show up: three in the morning or three in the afternoon, they’re all the same to me when I’m working on something. At the same time, you wanted the cops to get the gun. I don’t know for sure what you hoped to accomplish. But I guess the gun meant something to you: the interrupted robbery, your sister’s death, and most of all, Yates and Ward. You hoped that the police would be able to read the gun like a book, get them to start asking questions about those good old Golden Rule days at Secord. You couldn’t know that it was only by an extraordinary piece of luck the gun was linked to that robbery. But the trail ended there. The registration of the gun led nowhere. It didn’t lead to Ward. Bad luck.

“More bad luck when you ran into my boozy neighbour, Frank Bushmill. He heard you ferreting around in my office. You heard him call out in time to hide behind the door. When he came in, you hit him. Very professionally. What did you use?”

“I had some shot inside two pairs of woollen socks. I hope I didn’t hurt him too badly?”

“I’m not sure I know what you think is badly enough.” Hilda looked confused by the word games. It had been a cheap shot, and I was sorry. “Anyway, he’s fine now, completely restored to his dipsomania.”

“It’s dark. The lights are coming on down below.”

“Yes, so they are. I missed seeing it. I’m nearly finished.”

“In a strange way, Mr. Cooperman-Ben-I’m enjoying this. It’s one thing to be found out when you intended to get away with something. But since I never meant to fool anyone for long, I at least have the satisfaction of knowing that I will not be misunderstood. You can be my witness.”

“Now we come to Bill Ward. He told me that you’d telephoned him. I warned him to be careful of you, but he wouldn’t listen. By then, he knew who you were, and may have believed that you were involved in Chester’s death. He thought that his bodyguards would give him ample protection.”

“We went for a drink, first.” Hilda said. She wasn’t looking at me, but staring out over the edge of the escarpment where the hawks had been flying in the afternoon. She was curled sideways in her chair for warmth, hugging herself with her arms.

“Will you take my jacket?”

“No, let’s finish. He was pretending that he didn’t connect me with the past, but he’d been drinking; he got careless. It was nearly midnight when he drove back to Bellevue Terrace.”

“Just as he’d driven you there so many times before. He drove into the garage and closed the door. Somehow you got him to get back into the front seat of the car. Then you distracted him and while he was in that condition, you jabbed him with a needle, another memento of your friendship with Liz Tilford. He may not have felt a thing.”

“He did, actually. I told him it was a pin in my dress. He made a joke, I forget what, and then he began to get groggy.”

“After he passed out, you found his keys, let yourself into the house and returned them to him. The last act was to turn on the car’s ignition. You let yourself out the back door of the house, cut through the hedge to the lane and eventually made your way back here. You couldn’t know that in the morning his bodyguards would attempt to save Ward’s good name by driving him away from what might be seen by the authorities as a love nest, and sending him into the quarry. That spoiled the fine finish you’d planned, but at least it wasn’t your fault. And once the police began stripping away the sham of a not very convincing accident, they had what looked to them like another suicide.” I paused and took a minute to catch my breath. Hilda’s penetrating eyes were fixed on me. I’d finished, but she was waiting for more. For what? A verdict? A sentence?

“You’ve done what you swore to do, and you did it selflessly and with dispatch. Your sister’s death, Hilda, is thoroughly revenged.”

“I didn’t expect anyone to have understood so well. I never feared being caught, I expected that, but I was afraid of the story getting twisted, afraid they’d dismiss me as a lunatic.”

I didn’t see her get up, but when I brought my eyes back from the place where the garden dropped away, I saw that her chair was empty. I rose involuntarily. She was standing in front of me in the gloom. “I’m glad it was you, Ben. And I want to give you something.” From her collar she unfastened a small brooch, which she pressed into my hand. I could feel the hair on my arms prickling. She put her hands lightly on my chest and kissed me. In a moment, she was back in her chair as though nothing had happened. “I’m quite calm now,” she said. I looked out at the dark shapes above the glow of the city. Minutes went by, falling over the edge.

“What are you going to do, Ben?” The voice was tranquil.

“You know very well.”

“Yes,” she said with a sigh, “and I know what I must do.” She sounded content and peaceful. There wasn’t a thing I could say. She smiled at me there in the dark, and I looked at her for a long time without moving. Neither of us said anything more. Below us, the lights of traffic were snaking between the straight lines of streetlights. There were thousands of lights down below, but somehow they didn’t cut through the darkness.