Howard Engel - The Suicide Murders

It was the night of the day after. We were sitting at one of Lije Swift’s tables on the road to Niagara. It was well after midnight and I’d been drinking. Pete Staziak and Chris Savas had taken me under their wings. I’d been roped into coming out to Lije’s for a real feed, Pete called it, and it had been. Cheese stuffed into the hollow of celery sticks, then there was duck from some lake in Quebec, covered with orange slices, a mixture of supper and breakfast.

The French wine helped. It helped a lot. I could hear Pete and Chris talking over me while I concentrated on getting the last of the crisp skin off the final piece of breast. I didn’t try to pull any of the sound close, I let it sail past. I’d become sick of the sound of my own voice lately, always telling about suicides that weren’t suicides, and all those women who were really the same woman.

Lije appeared at the table holding a bottle in his chubby hands. They hung on the shortest of arms. I tried to imagine him at the wheel of a speedboat somewhere in the upper Niagara, between the coast guard and the falls, with a boat full of bonded Canadian booze. He was inviting us to have some cognac. I said sure. Why not? Last night I’d felt pretty gloomy, but now I was enjoying the food, the drink and the company. I took a sip of the cognac, and it bit my lip. I took a bigger sip, to bite it back, and it snapped at my gullet all the way down.

Peter was leaning forward on his arms which had pushed away his dinner plate. “How you feeling, pardner?” he said to me.

“Doing fine, sheriff. What time’s the hanging?”

“No neck-tie party today, pardner. We’re plumb out of suspects. The only thing we got is Harrow’s goat, and I think we’ll roast that nice and slow. He didn’t much appreciate the help you gave him on this case, did he?”

“You noticed that?” Savas chimed in, worrying his teeth with his tongue.

“The surprise is that the bugger didn’t create a royal rumpus when we dumped it all on the table.” I grinned at the love birds on the willow pattern. “The thing I still can’t get straight,” Pete said, dredging up the last of the cognac in his glass, “is Zekerman’s death. Benny, run that one by me again.” I groaned, and pretended to collapse, but both Pete and Chris protested. I had to reach for the rusty gearshift and try to engage my wits with my mouth still loping along in neutral.

“All right, you guys, but this is the last time.”

“Right.”

“Okay. Zekerman’s death didn’t have anything to do with Hilda’s holy plot to punish the other two. You understand that she couldn’t accept the truth about her sister. She couldn’t even see that her death was accidental. Elizabeth took too much, or from a bad batch. She was still alive when Ward and Yates took her back to the residence, but only barely. Ward set the stage for the suicide. But Corso, who’d been closest to Elizabeth, started to crack. Ward and Yates must have found out that he was in contact with Hilda. They knew that the secret had to be contained. So they popped Corso.

“And nothing happened for a whole bunch of years. Corso and Elizabeth were dead. Hilda was in a mental hospital, and Ward and Yates went about making lots of money and joining expensive clubs. They got married, they became as respectable as their parents had been. Chester was always turning a sod or talking to the Canadian Club; Ward was always cutting ribbons or whispering sound advice into the shell-like ear of His Worship the Mayor. Then this neat little world of theirs was threatened by the past. Zekerman had found out about extracurricular activities back at Secord University. Hilda Blake, fresh out of Queen Street, spilled all the sordid details to her shrink. He heard about the illegal drugs, the interrupted burglary that ended with the guard getting hurt, the deaths of Elizabeth and then Corso. I’ll bet he couldn’t believe his luck. He already ran a profitable business. There are plenty of people in this town who are glad Zekerman is out of the way. So, for a long time, Zekerman milked Ward and Yates like an ant milks an aphid; he was reasonable, not pressing them too much on any one occasion because he knew that there was going to be a next and a next.

“Then he heard about Core Two from Chester. Zekerman was a greedy bastard from the day he slipped off the delivery table trying to steal the forceps. He wasn’t satisfied with a monthly hand-out any more. He wanted a share of the profits.”

I reached into my pocket and brought out an envelope. In it I’d placed the page of appointments Martha had sent me and a piece of paper I’d been scribbling on. I passed the original sheet to Pete.

Jones

Saturday, 2 A.M.

Henry

Friday, 11 P.M.

Bill

Friday, 1 A.M.

Peters

Friday, 2 P.M.

Careless

Friday, 8 P.M.

Harney

Friday, 7 P.M.

Evans

Friday, 9 A.M.

York

Friday, 2 P.M.

Henderson

Friday, 6 A.M.

Evans

Friday, 3 P.M.

Peters

Friday, 6 P.M.

Richards

Friday, 1 A.M.

Dodge

Friday, 8 P.M.

Plymouth

Friday, 8 A.M.

Ford

Friday, 9 A.M.

Williams

Friday, 6 P.M.

Roberts

Friday, 4 A.M.

He looked at it for a while and then passed it without comment to Chris Savas. Savas examined it, smiled and returned it to me.

“When I first saw it,” I continued. “I couldn’t make heads or tails of it: all of those ordinary names, the car names, names that meant nothing, or very little, to Martha Tracy, Chester’s secretary. Then one night I decided to forget about the names. They might be there only to confuse things. So what’s left: a bunch of appointments for a Friday and Saturday running right around the clock with no time off for things like sleeping or eating. The meetings are all helter-skelter so it’s hard to see who’s coming next. But then I got the idea that the order was the key. That phrase I just used ‘around the clock’ hit me again. I drew a circle and represented on it the numbers on the face of a clock. Now, if each hour represented a letter, then you’d have to go around twice to include all but the last two letters in the English alphabet. The last two letters would take us into Saturday. Friday 1 A.M. equals A; Friday 2 A.M. equals B; and so on down to Saturday 2 A.M. equals Z. Well, I tried it out.” Here I passed around the table the second piece of paper:

Z WANTS IN FOR A THIRD

I heard Pete’s low whistle as he passed the sheet to Chris.

“My guess is that this is a rough copy of the message Chester sent to Ward, a message which tipped Ward off to the stakes the greedy shrink was playing for. Ward was a practical man, he knew that he would have to do something about Zekerman.”

“But didn’t the picture change when Yates caught it?” Pete asked.

“How could it? Chester’s share would be paid into the company. Ward’s interests were legally guaranteed no matter who headed up Chester’s company. But Chester’s death decided Ward to act as quickly as he could to eliminate this bloodsucker. He knew that Zekerman kept no secretary or receptionist; he knew that he wouldn’t run into any other patients. He just kept his regular appointment, and when he found a moment, he clobbered Zekerman with his own African statue. When he’d made sure that he was dead, he went over the office carefully, taking the appointment book, a group of files including his own and Chester’s, and anything else with his name on it. In another two minutes, he was walking back to his office.

“Funny thing about that: as soon as he examined the files, he knew Zekerman hid his dirty secrets elsewhere. Ward and I both started wondering where that might be just about the same time. I got to the blackmail files only minutes ahead of his boys.”