Getting Away With Murder

TWENTY

Once reinstalled behind my desk, I examined the report I was writing for Wise. It was going well. I added information I had learned recently and worked away at it for another half-hour. A final detail was an invoice for services rendered up to and including Friday, March 11. That done, I walked across the street to the Print Shop to make copies. Back in the office, I took the top copy and put it in an envelope. Then, thinking of its confidential nature, I opened a bottom drawer and brought out a stick of red sealing wax with a wick running through it like a candle. I lit the wick and dribbled a pool of wax on the back of the envelope where the flap was stuck. It was very satisfying to watch the wax puddle and cool. I felt for a moment caught up in a profession as old as the pyramids, full of echoes of ancient Rome, Charles Dickens and Erle Stanley Gardner, all of which induced a welcome feeling of stability and well-being. After it had cooled a little, I impressed my signet ring into the red mass and, on trying to remove it, lost the bloodstone with its engraved “B.” I got it out with a paper-clip and blew out the sealing wax. Removing the ring from my finger, I parked the birthstone under the paper-clips in the top drawer.

When my handiwork was all ready to go, I returned to St. Andrew Street looking around for a sign of Mickey Armstrong or one of his merry men. The streets were hoodless, not a heavy in sight. I walked up St. Andrew Street a block, hoping to spot Phil or Sidney staring into windows of lingerie stores or babywear shoppes about three or four stores behind me. No luck. I was going to have to invest in a stamp and mail my report if I couldn’t find one of Wise’s happy runners.

Turning around, I walked west on the main street until I came to the Bernstein Travel Bureau. Inside, I found my old friend Laura behind the counter talking to customers bound for an early spring visit to Galway, Ireland. I hadn’t been in the store long before Phil Green came in behind me. He busied himself looking at the rack of brochures while I listened to Laura talk about the beauties of the West Country. Before she had me in her sights, while the ink was drying on her customers’ cheque on the counter, I turned to Phil and handed him the sealed envelope with instructions to take it directly to his boss without stopping to pass “Go.” Phil blinked at me, crunched a Lifesaver, and backed out the door, not quite understanding what had happened to him. As for Laura, we had a short chat, then I wandered across to the Di for a cup of coffee.

Sitting in my regular golden-stained booth and sipping deeply of the stuff that makes the world go around, I couldn’t keep from thinking of the report: small omissions, connections, suspicions. All in all, it was a peculiar case. Abe Wise was the spider in the middle of his web. All of the other people were ranged about him in some way. Whatever they did outside of their association with Wise was irrelevant to my inquiry. I’d talked to a lot of people. In fact this case was almost all talk. Questions and answers. Q and A. Then on to the next. Although I’d talked to lots of people about Wise, Wise wasn’t coming to life in a different way for me because of what I’d learned. Wise was the same guy to everybody. There wasn’t anything devious about him, which is a peculiar thing to say about a master crook. He had the system beat. He hadn’t changed much over the years. The Wise that Rogers had described to me was the Wise that Paulette used to wait on back in the 1950s, at this very table maybe.

I walked back to the office. The first stage of the case was over. I would get a call from Wise, or from Mickey, telling me that there was a cheque coming of these days: payment to date for services described in the report, or maybe offering to let me live untroubled for a few years in lieu of payment. This was reaction time. Time for Wise to read and think of what to do next. Time for me to tidy my desk, remove the hair and fuzz from the mass of paper-clips, get my ring fixed, try to think of what I was going to do next to earn the second instalment of Abe Wise’s bounty. I thought of the coming weekend with Anna listening to paper after paper up at Secord at a conference. I thought of Hart and Julie, or Mickey and Vicky, Paulette and Lily, of Neustadt and Mary Tatarski. It was a rich cast, but they weren’t up to anything very interesting. Well, Neustadt had entered upon eternity and someone had seen to it that it looked like an accident. Staziak was going to phone me one of these days and tell me that person or persons unknown had turned the valve on the jack that was supporting Neustadt’s Buick. That made it murder. A murder, he’ll tell me without clues or witnesses, a murder without a future as far as he was concerned.

But what kind of murder was it? A murder that is committed without a weapon? Was it premeditated? How could it be? The victim was lying under his car, not in conflict with his killer. The killer could have come and seized the opportunity. This was a strange killing from any way you looked at it. I tried to imagine the picture. The killer came up the driveway where Neustadt was under his car with his tools around him. It was a quiet spot, a neighbourhood of houses. If the season had been summer, it could have been a set for “Leave It to Beaver.” The old man and his car. Small-town values. Do it yourself.

Neustadt didn’t talk to his killer, or if he did, he did it from under the car. If he sensed any danger, he would have run himself out on the creeper board he was lying on. It had casters in my picture and it would only have taken a moment to get out from under. No, this seemed to be a crime without conversation. The killer came up the walk, turned the valve and walked away without attracting any attention from the house or along the street.

And how did the murderer know about Neustadt’s practice of servicing his own car? Did he know that he changed his own oil? Must have. The major said he was a man of established habits. Then, it becomes clear, unless I’ve lost my way in this thing, the murder of Ed Neustadt was a well-plotted and well-researched act. The murderer knew where Neustadt lived, and that he would be under his car changing his oil on the first Sunday in March. He also knew that his jack was hydraulic.

And who was this murderer? One of the many people he sent away to Kingston for a nice long term? Somebody who felt that Neustadt’s zeal as a law officer was exaggerated? Someone with a long-standing grudge? This was not your usual murderer. Such a crime might have been hanging in the air for a long time waiting for all of the circumstances to be right. He had to be alone. There could not be any witnesses. It had to be the day of the oil change. Neustadt was a man of regular habits. Even on that chilly Sunday.

When the phone interrupted my reverie it was Whitey York, the lawyer who had been dunning Hart Wise. “Mr. Cooperman, I said I would be in touch with you.”

“That was a few days ago. But thanks for remembering. What’s the verdict?”

“I have talked to my client and he has decided not to deal. We intend to carry the matter through normal procedures and let the courts decide.”

“You’re really going to stick it to him?”

“That calls for interpretation, Mr. Cooperman. I just called to let you know.”

“Damn! When did you last speak with your client?”

“Early last evening. We discussed it thoroughly. I-”

“You haven’t talked to him today?”

“I left a message at his office just after nine-thirty, but-”

That’s where I hung up the phone and left the office in a hurry. In less than ten minutes I was parked down the street from Brighton Motors on Niagara Street. Inside, the salesmen, who were flying a paper airplane, told me that Gordon Shaw hadn’t been in since early morning. He had had a call and then left the office abruptly without leaving word where he might be reached.

Standing outside, I tried to imagine where he had gone. For him to have taken on Abe Wise in this direct way was foolish beyond belief. It would have been like me telling him to shove his proposition to me last Monday up the nearest city councillor’s drainpipe.

Yesterday’s overnight snow was already fading away. In spite of the cold, the snow couldn’t manage under the bright sun. The cars in Shaw’s lot, at the back where the old jail used to be, were still covered, blanketed for the most part, in white, but patches had melted or slipped off, heavy with moisture. One of the cars had lost more snow than the others. It was a stunning red Alfa Romeo. I went over to have a look. Through a line of big zeros written on the windshield, slumped in the driver’s seat, I saw Gordon Sawchuck, who did business under the name Shaw. Without opening the door, I could tell that he was dead, an opinion supported by the handle of a knife I could see a few inches away from that dirty old school tie he liked to wear. In the snow by the passenger side, I stepped on a piece of dark metal in the shape of an Indian’s head. I moved away from the car to do some private dry retching.