Howard Engel - The Suicide Murders

“But, if that’s the name of the game, why should he suddenly blow his brains out?”

“I guess even hustlers can have enough,” he shrugged in the glass over the bottles of hair tonic which, in the ten years I’d been coming to Bill, he’d never used on me.

“Uh huh.”

“I used to know his wife Myrna. Years ago. She came from the west end same as me. Her father had a wrecking yard out Pelham Road. There were two of them on the way out to Power Gorge, and her father ran the one closest to town. She was a saucy little tramp in public school. She, you know, developed early for a girl, and she knew what it was all about when the rest of us thought balls were for basketball hoops. Of course, she’s changed a lot now. Settled. Money does that. Funny thing about money, Ben: it makes people different, inside. Outside, you can’t tell much. I had Lord Robinson, the newspaper tycoon, sitting right where you are one time, and he wasn’t any different from anybody else. I couldn’t find any trace of his organizing genius in his hair. Ginger-coloured it was, getting kind of sparse so he liked it combed across. But where was all that power for making money? He had dandruff, same as you.”

The morning was well advanced by the time I left the hotel and started back to the office. The sidewalks showed a few storekeepers leaning against their plate-glass windows. Without thinking about it, I was staring into the window of the sporting-goods store at the baseball mitts and English Dinky toys. I could see the old man at the counter in an otherwise empty shop. An old-fashioned bell rang as I opened the door.

“Yes?” he said, looking over his glasses. “Say, aren’t you Manny Cooperman’s boy?” I nodded. “I thought so. I’ve known your father for forty years. He used to bring you in here when you were a boy. Which one are you? One of you is a doctor, isn’t that right?”

“I’m Ben, the one that stayed at home.”

“That’s right, I see you go by once in a while. You don’t come in any more. Say, I remember one time your father brought you in here, you couldn’t have been more than three or four, but walking you know, and I asked you-it must have been in the 1940s, just after the war started-and I asked you, just kidding, mind, who did you think was going to win the war over in Europe. And you thought a minute, I’ll never forget it, and said that you thought that both sides were going to lose. Now can you beat that? Do you remember saying that? Did your father ever tell you that story? I know it was you. You or your brother. Couldn’t have been more than five or six. Yes, sir, I’ll never forget that.”

He seemed to sink into his private past for a minute, looking very tall and thin in the tall, thin store with the light coming in through the bicycle wheels in the window.

“It was my brother.”

“Hmmm?” he asked, pretty far away.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Is there something special you are looking for, Ben? We don’t see you much these last few years. We seem to lose them after high school and then pick them up again when they start tennis and racketball. But there’s a ten-year gap sometimes. I didn’t catch. Did you say you were looking for something special?”

“Oh, I was vaguely looking at your bikes through the window-it’s Mr. MacLeish, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. You know my brother’s gone.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Well, that was a good many years ago now. It gets longer every time I add it up. You were asking about bicycles. Yes, a lot of people your age are riding safety bikes. You know I sell more to young adults than I do to teenagers. Isn’t that a pretty paradox for you? I guess it’s the gears they have today that they didn’t have in your day or in mine. And it’s all this play they give to fitness on the television. Don’t you think that’s so?”

I walked with Mr. MacLeish to his display of bicycles. He had about twenty on the floor and another bunch hanging from hooks on the wall. Behind a partition, a teenager in a mouse-coloured shopcoat was assembling more from wooden crates.

“Funny thing,” Mr. MacLeish said, his watery eyes winking over his lenses, “speaking about bikes. You know who came in through that door yesterday afternoon? It just goes to show you that you can’t be too careful on the subject of fitness. Well, sir, yesterday afternoon

I had a customer looking at bikes, and he was a dead man by the time I closed up for the night.”

“You mean Chester Yates?”

“Why how’d you know that? That’s right. Isn’t that a remarkable thing?”

“Well, I guess anybody can look at bikes even if he means to shoot himself in an hour.”

“Ben, I agree with you. It might calm a desperate man about to commit a desperate act. But Ben, looking at bikes is one thing, and buying them’s another.”

“What?”

“That’s what I say. Buying a ten-speed bike and then killing yourself, that’s a totally different can of paint.”

I walked back to the office without seeing anything much. All I knew was that the file I had marked “closed” was open again, and written at the top of the first page inside was “Concerning the death of Chester Yates.” It didn’t add up and things that don’t add up give me heartburn. So, I went to work. I phoned Dr. Zekerman, but got an answering service. It was the same service I use, so I was able to quiz the girl and discover that the doctor sometimes picked up his calls between patients but often didn’t bother until late in the afternoon. No, there wasn’t a nurse or receptionist who picked up the calls, it was always the doctor. I left my number with her.

Next I called Peter Staziak in Homicide. We’d been in the same class in Chemistry at high school, and I’d been in a school play with his sister. I asked him who was handling the Yates suicide and he put me on to a Sergeant Harrow, who was supposed to have all the answers. I told Harrow what I had and I could hear him breathing steadily at the other end, without any sudden intakes of air. Then he wanted to know who I was and why it had become my business. He seemed to be more interested in that than in the news about a suicide buying a ten-speed bike an hour before killing himself. Finally he said, “Look, Mr. Cooperman, I want to thank you for coming forward with this information, but the case is closed.”

“There’ll be an inquest, won’t there?” I asked.

“Sure, but that’s just routine too. You see, sir, we have the report from the medical examiner who says that death came from a self-inflicted wound in the head. The powder burns say that it was a self-inflicted wound, the fingerprints say so and so does the paraffin test.”

“That doesn’t mean much to me. I mostly do divorce work.”

“Well, Mr. Cooperman, I think you’d better go back to your transom gazing and let us get on with our work. Thanks just the same.”

“Wait a minute! What have you got for the motive? Why’d he do it?”

“Like it says in the paper: he was depressed and overworked. Look, Mr. Cooperman, this is a dead one. If you want to play sleuth, we’ve got dozens of cases you can go to work on.” His irony had the same effect as someone digging you in the ribs with his elbow repeating “Did you get it?” I got it and then got off the line.

I was getting nowhere fast. I looked up the name of Chester’s company in the book and dialled it. I asked for Yates’ office, and when the noise of clicking and switching stopped I asked for Martha Tracy, Chester’s secretary.

“She’s off sick today, sir. Can I help you?”

“Can you give me Miss Tracy’s home number?”

“I’m very sorry, we don’t give out that information.”