Howard Engel - The Suicide Murders

“What you call reasonable, I call looking the other way.” I heard a buzzer sound. His right hand was moving away from a button on his intercom. His face was moving from mauve to purple. I intended to stay out of his reach, as he got up and started around the end of his desk in my direction. The door opened and the girl with the plastic glasses stood between us.

“Miss Keiller, Mr. Cooperman is leaving now. I want you to take a good look at him, because if he ever comes to the office again, I don’t want him to get by your desk. Do you understand?” She nodded, swallowing her explanation. Harrington grabbed a couple of his folders, and strode past me and Miss Keiller through the door and out into the real world of civic politics. Miss Keiller and I stood fixed like we’d been bolted to the broadloom until a door slammed at the far end of the corridor. I tried to flip her a grin as I went by her, but I think I missed.

Just before five o’clock I walked through the double glass doors of the limestone-fronted Caddell Building and punched the elevator for the eight floor. That put me on the floor above Yates’ operation. I decided to try walking to my right as soon as the doors opened in case I looked lost when some receptionist looked up. But there wasn’t a receptionist. The floor was divided into a number of small offices with doors leading off the corridor. I found the Men’s Room and went inside a cubicle for a smoke. At five after five I found the red exit sign and walked down one flight of stairs. Inside the door of “Scarp Enterprises” all was quiet. I found the door with Chester’s name on it in stand-out white plastic letters. It was locked. I fished around in the top drawer of the desk just outside Yates’ office, Martha Tracy’s, I guessed, and found a key in the paperclip box. I couldn’t be sure when Glassock would make his first check, so I had to get in and out quickly. I tried to ignore the geography once I closed to door again. I could take it all in again later. What I needed now was some link with the dead man that might carry me along for another couple of days. The desk top was clear. So were all the other surfaces. I pulled out the first drawer that opened: envelopes, paperclips, and company letterhead. If he had a private address book that had been taken with other obvious stuff by the police. I was looking for sloppy seconds, and found them in a middle drawer. It was a clipboard with the agenda of a board meeting on it. A few words were underlined and there was a feeble attempt at a drawing of Mickey Mouse in one corner. He was no artist. That was something. Elsewhere on the sheet he appeared to be trying to design a logo. The Arabic numeral two and the letter “C” were drawn in three different possible arrangements. There was one attempt with the Roman numeral for two, “II.” I scanned the agenda and couldn’t find anything beginning with “C” or having a “2” or “II” connected in any way. No, the meeting had to do with Scarp Estates, with a sewage contract, with tenders for foundation construction, and others for roofing. I was getting nervous, so I slammed the clipboard back in the drawer and left the room in a middle-sized sweat.

The outer office was still bright and silent. No sign of elevator noise. I could sit on my hands and wait, I thought, or I could see what useful information might lie out in the open. First I noted down Martha Tracy’s home telephone number from a typed list of names and numbers inside the lid of a metal desk-top file. I also found a glossy brochure describing Scarp Estates, a new subdivision planned for the top of the escarpment that runs through the peninsula like a spine, with Niagara Falls which tumbles over it supplying hydroelectric power for the expanding industries of the area. From the brochure it was plain that Scarp Enterprises was dabbling in some of that industrial expansion along with the real estate development. Nice going, I thought. But the brochure didn’t say anything about somebody dying in order to keep it running so smoothly.

I could hear the security man let himself into the outer office, and so I leaned back and lit a cigarette.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked, putting his time clock down on the edge of a white metal desk.

“I’m Behan of the Beacon . You’re Glassock?”

“Yeah.”

“You found the body?” He just stood there like someone had given him the prize in the box of Cracker-jacks.

“Yeah.”

“My editor thinks that there’s a lot of this story that didn’t get in today’s paper. He wants me to try a new angle, human interest stuff: TOM GREENOCK FINDS CORPSE. How’s that for a headline?”

“Glassock.”

“Even better. HARDWORKING TOM GLASSOCK STUMBLES ON BODY OF CORPORATE GIANT. How’m I doing?” I hated to take advantage of the poor geezer, but everybody’s got to make a living. So, I strung him a little. I wasn’t stealing his watch. “What I want you to give me is the whole story in your own words.” I picked up a green pad with a spiral binding from Martha Tracy’s “Pending” basket and licked the end of my pencil.

“You going to write down what I say? Put it in the paper?”

“That’s right,” I said giving him my Pulitzer Prize smile.

“Well, now, I don’t know about that. I got a family to think of. It’s as good as my job if I blab to everybody.”

“Well, Tom, the Beacon isn’t everybody.”

“True, but …”

“Tell you what. Anything you say is off the record, I’ll forget I ever heard it. You’ve got my word on that.”

“Well, I guess it’s all right, or they wouldn’t have sent you. What do you want to know?”

“Why don’t you just walk through it and show me the way it was?”

“Right. Well, I came in that door over there,” he indicated the main door leading from the two elevators.

“That was about this time yesterday? A little after five?” He bent his head and studied his leather-bound clock for a minute. I could see the pink of his scalp through his gray hair.

“Later than that. I was on my first round, but this is a big building. I have to answer for the whole twelve floors, keeps me hopping. It must have been same time as usual, that’s five forty-five.”

“Is that the time on yesterday’s card?”

“Well, yesterday, it was a little later. It was five fifty-seven, they told me. That’s a little off my regular time but not by much.”

“Did you hear anything?”

“No. These places are built with thick concrete floors. I couldn’t have heard anything unless I was on this floor somewheres. Well, sir, I came through this aisle as usual and saw that Mr. Yates’ door was open.”

“Were the other office doors open?”

“Most of ’em. And I saw that Mr. Yates’ door was open.”

“But you just said …”

“I know. Well, it was open, that’s all. And I looked in and there he was.”

“Could you show me?”

“Sure.” He brought out a bunch of keys and studied them closely. “This should be it,” he said and it was.

Chester Yates’ office, which I now took in for the first time in detail, told the world what Chester wanted it to know about him. He had a corner office with light coming in through windows on two walls. Through the sheer floor-length curtains I could see north to the lake and follow the coast around in a gentle arc until it disappeared in the haze. His desk was a wide expanse of immaculate white, without a paper on it to suggest that these surroundings had a hold on whoever sat behind it. The walls were industrial wallboard, whose covering suggested wood panelling. The wall that Chester faced as he signed his name on the dotted line all day was a busy place. He had one of those credenza things which covered his files, over which a three-tiered bookshelf caught my eye. The chair behind the desk was the same sort of orange that the green broadloom was. The kind of colour that doesn’t exist outside an interior decorator’s mind. I took a closer look at this handsome object. It was a swivel chair, and from now on when it swivelled would swivel over a dark brown stain on the rug.