Howard Engel - The Suicide Murders

I was looking for a four-letter word for “narrow path,” when I heard high heels on the stairs. High heels usually means business for me rather than for Dr. Bushmill, the chiropodist. With men on the stairs, it was only guessing. I put away the newspaper in time to see a fuzzy silhouette through the frosted glass of the door hesitate for a moment before knocking. I called “Come in already!” and she did.

She was the sort of woman that made you wish you’d stayed in the shower for an extra minute or taken another three minutes shaving. I felt a little underdressed in my own office. She had what you could call a tailored look. Everything was so understated it screamed. I could hear the echo bouncing off the bank across the street.

She took a chair on the other side of my bleached oak desk and played around with her handbag. It matched her shoes, and I thought that the car outside probably matched the rest of the outfit. Sitting in the sunlight, with the shadow of the letters of my sign caressing her trim figure, she looked about thirty, but I put part of that down to decent treatment, regular meals, baths and trips to Miami, things like that. When she raised her eyes to look at me, they were gray.

“You’re Mr. Cooperman?” she asked.

“Would I lie to you?” I said, trying to help her over the awkward stage. The sign on the door told the truth too: BENJAMIN COOPERMAN, LICENCED PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. “What can I do for you, Miss …?” Her lips smiled suddenly, like a puppeteer pulled the right string and then released it. Her eyes didn’t change.

“I’m Myrna Yates,” she said, looking to see if that meant anything. It didn’t, but what I don’t know about the upper crust in this town could fill a library. I hated to lose her respect for me so early in our association by not raising an eyebrow, but the hour was early and the day was hot. She tried it another way, with more luck. “Chester Yates is my husband.”

“The contractor?”

“Among other things, yes.” She looked down at the handbag again, just as things had started rolling.

“Sure, I guess I’ve heard of your husband. He’s not missed too many chances to be interviewed in the paper lately, has he? Still, if I were in his shoes, I’d see that it was probably good for business. How can I help you, Mrs. Yates?” She sighed like I’d asked her to write War and Peace on a credit card, and then looked like she was about to plunge.

“It says in your advertisement in the Yellow Pages that you do private investigations.” I nodded encouragement.

“You do civil, criminal, industrial and domestic investigation?” She was rapidly moving to the top of the class.

“That’s right, Mrs. Yates. I do all that, although between the two of us, I leave the industrial stuff to Niagara and Pinkertons. They can afford to keep all those guys in uniform and pay for the fancy electronic equipment. Me? I’m just a peeper. Divorce is my meat and potatoes. I could be wrong, though. I heard that Niagara set up six TV cameras to catch a fast operator a month ago and I hear he got away with all six of the cameras. And frankly, since they’ve been fooling around with the law on divorce, I’ve been having to cut down on meat and potatoes. Don’t listen to me. I talk too much. Is it something about those articles in the paper? Something about the subdivision he’s involved in, maybe?”

She shook her head like we were playing charades and I’d wasted thirty seconds not catching the conventional gesture for the . “It’s not about that at all. May I smoke?” She dug into her bag and brought out a pack of menthol cigarettes. I could have guessed. I tried my top drawer for a book of matches, but by the time I came up with one she was already exhaling her first lungful. The smoke added cotton-candy wisps to the sunlight streaming in from over the second-storey rooftops of St. Andrew Street. She looked around at my licence hanging in a black frame behind me and the studied the clutter on top of my filing cabinet. When she had satisfied her curiosity, she examined the end of her cigarette for a minute. Then she looked at me quickly, her gray eyes widening. “I think he’s seeing another woman,” she said, “and I want to know for sure. I want to know who it is and I want pictures and dates and times and …”

“The whole schmeer. I get the picture.” I lit up a Player’s Medium and took it all the way down. Then I gave her my standard speech intended to scare off clients who were just playing around. “Tell me, Mrs. Yates, have you and your husband quarreled? Did something happen this morning or last night? What I’m trying to find out is, are you really looking for a divorce? If you are, there are easier ways of going about it, God knows, than putting a tail on him. Are things that bad? Look, even though I can use all the clients that can climb those stairs, I think you ought to be honest with both of us. I don’t want you to come to me in a year’s time pointing at me and saying that if it wasn’t for me you’d still be pouring tea at the Junior League.” I could see that she wanted me to finish, so I did.

“Mr. Cooperman, I know that I could go to a lawyer. That’s not what I want. Not yet. As you guess, I’m reasonably comfortable and going to a lawyer at this stage, in this town, well it just …” She let the unfinished sentence hang there between us as though we both regularly had to face throwing up one hundred thousand dollars a year in exchange for the Russian roulette of the courtroom and golden dreams of alimony. She threw in one of her mechanical smiles, which still didn’t light up her eyes. I brushed a fallen ash off my still unmarked pad of yellow foolscap on to my shirt and tie, a klutzy gesture but maybe it lets clients relax and open up a little.

“Okay, I’ve got it so far. You are not flying out the window after a fight. You are oyster calm and collected in limited editions. What makes you think your husband is playing around, Mrs. Yates? You can be frank with me.”

“I came here to be frank. It’s the only way.”

“Good. Why don’t you start at the beginning and tell me the whole story from the top, as they say.” She took a long drag on her cigarette and let the smoke find its own way out while she collected her thoughts. I picked up a ball-point pen and looked as serious as a graduation photograph.

“We’ve been married for nearly twenty years. When we met, I had just given up on a business school after having made a mess of high school. I was popular and I ran with a pretty wild bunch. When I say wild , I don’t mean like the kids today with their pot and drugs. We drank a little and fooled around, but mostly in groups, so nobody got in too deeply.” I pictured Myrna Yates at eighteen, trying it on, not getting in too deeply, and held that image in my mind while watching this immaculately tailored Myrna Yates talking at me from across the desk.

“I don’t remember when I first met Chester. I can remember a gang of college boys moving in on us. They had newer cars than the ones we were used to, and had a better line. Chester was one of them, and I remember slowing becoming aware of him being around. You know what I mean? He was just there: chunky, dependable and smiling. He was always hanging around, and soon he was running out to buy me cigarettes and freshen my drink. That sort of thing. I don’t think I ever saw him as my dreamboat. I had lots of other interests. In the summers we all went necking in the dunes down by the lake. Chester was always breathing down my neck. I could tell he wanted me, and for a long time I strung him along, not giving in to him, and not taking him very seriously. I guess you think I’m just getting a little of my own back, Mr. Cooperman?”