Getting Away With Murder

TWENTY-SEVEN

From the outside, Abe Wise’s two houses at the end of Dorset Crescent looked like they always had, only now they held less terror than the first time I was driven there. Several passenger cars of various sorts were parked along the street nearest the crescent. A couple of police cruisers were parked too, with a large grey police van sheltering around the back next to Pete Staziak’s own car. I parked close to the official party to gain status.

The inside of the main house was also unchanged with the exception of the yellow plastic barrier that the police had hung around the scene of the crime: it may have been drooping more, like it had been hanging there a long time. Chairs from the TV room had been moved into the office and some of the people I had met since that early Monday morning awakening were talking in a group with Pete Staziak when I came into the room. Pete hadn’t really filled the hall for me. Unless the law has a hold on you, it can’t tell you to drive to Dorset Crescent, just like that, even to help them in their investigation. Paulette and Lily hadn’t come. Neither had Dave Rogers, Whitey York or Major Patrick. Duncan Harvey was nowhere to be seen, and of the Three Stooges, only Syl Ryan was there, seated beside a uniformed officer. Didier Santerre, looking sorry for himself, stood apart from the group, near another uniformed officer. It didn’t look like the last reel of The Thin Man. The rafters were not bulging with suspicious characters. I wasn’t going to have to shout to be heard above the din of crosstalk. I should have looked on the bright side. Both of Abe Wise’s kids and the Armstrongs were in attendance. And, of course, McStu. I’d invited him myself, since he knew all of the fine print of the Tatarski case.

For a few minutes I stood examining an early American terracotta figure with a broken ear, then Pete called on everybody, all eight of us, to be seated. He reviewed what was already known about the death of Abram Wise-stealing my thunder-and introduced me as a friend of the investigation. He mentioned a couple of my successful cases, not all of them, then pulled me to the front of Wise’s old desk.

“The answer to why Abe Wise was killed is obvious,” I began. “He was killed because he was hated. ‘Hated’ is strong language, but when you think about it, it fills the bill.”

“Are you going to give a lecture, Benny?” McStu asked, innocently. “Why don’t you sit down and join the party?” He gave me a big grin, giving me a fine view of the space between his two front teeth. I found a chair, and we all moved our chairs into a circle, except for the Armstrongs who were sitting on a velvet couch.

“Look, all of you.” It was Mickey. “Nobody says Mr. Wise was an angel, but, given his … his … ”

“Questionable activities,” prompted McStu.

“Criminal past and present,” suggested Pete.

“Whatever,” said Mickey, shaking his head. “Mr. Wise was well respected inside the community he worked among. I can’t believe that he was killed by another … by somebody he did business with. Because he always played fair. He told me that it was the only way to play when you couldn’t write down the rules.” Victoria took his hand when he stopped talking.

“Fair enough,” I said. “I agree with Mickey. What happened to Mr. Wise had nothing to do with his criminal activities. He was killed because of something that happened many years ago.”

“I should have brought a sandwich,” Syl Ryan whispered to Victoria.

“When Abe Wise was still a young burglar, back in 1952, he was picked up, caught with the goods and arrested one night by probational patrolman Michael Prescott of Niagara Regional. It was a fair cop. Wise had been under surveillance for some time and he was caught with enough evidence to have sent him to Kingston for a few years or at least to a reformatory. But, Ed Neustadt, Prescott’s senior officer, let Wise walk. Why? We’ll have subpoena Prescott up in Muskoka. All we know right now is that Wise hated Neustadt. He went to his funeral, he told me, expressly to dance on his grave and to tarnish Neustadt’s reputation just by showing up. The only conclusion we can draw from this is that there was something between them: a guilty secret, perhaps. Let’s suppose that it was a secret. Something known to the young burglar and the ambitious policeman. What could it have been?

“Nineteen fifty-two was the year of the Tatarski case. I’ve checked the date of Wise’s arrest and the trial date. The trial was in its eighth day. It went to the jury on the following afternoon. For those of you old enough to remember, it was a major story around here and it made national headlines because it was a capital case involving a young unwed mother. Ed Neustadt was in charge of the investigation and I suggest to you that the secret had to do with this case. What could a young punk like Wise know about the Tatarskis? Did he live near them? No. Did he go to school with them? No. Did he know their house because he had gone into it during the commission of a robbery? Possibly, very possibly. Wasn’t he caught in the act in that same neighbourhood while the trial was in progress?

“But Mary Tatarski was convicted of killing her mother and then making the scene look like a burglary had been interrupted. Remember that Mary was old enough to remember the break-in five years earlier when her father was killed. A young impressionable girl like Mary, with a grievance against her mother, the Crown argued, wouldn’t have forgotten that.

“We know that Ed Neustadt needed the conviction of Mary Tatarski to advance his career. He also may have had some personal reason for proceeding with the case after he had got Wise to admit that he was the burglar who had been interrupted by Anastasia Tatarski that night. I don’t think this is the place to probe Neustadt’s warped character. We know he was tenacious, unforgiving-”

“He was an avenging son of a bitch!” shouted Sylvester Ryan, the studs and rings in his ears catching the light. “He never gave anyone a break.”

“Well, at least some of us agree that Neustadt had a certain zeal in doing the work he was paid to do. But why would he purposely overlook testimony that would clear the Tatarski woman? To my mind there is only one possibility: he was sure that if she hadn’t done this crime, she had done the earlier crime. He was sure Mary murdered her father!”

“But she was just a teenager!” McStu protested.

“Even so,” I said. “I didn’t say she did murder her father, I’m saying that Neustadt was sure she did. It was his way of getting himself off the hook for not telling the Crown prosecutor that Mary Tatarski was innocent. She had played him for a sucker when he was a fresh young cop. He had been beguiled by her, McStu. So, now he was going to show her, pay her back, and protect his own, simply by saying nothing.”

“I’m beginning to see through this,” McStu said, pulling at an earlobe. “His big problem is what is he going to do with young Wise. He has to shut him up.”

“Right! He trades liberty for silence.”

“Wise walks and the Tatarski case goes to the jury,” Pete said, half to himself.

“That’s no deal,” Hart volunteered. “It’s an invitation to blackmail.”

“The Abe Wise of 1952 wasn’t as canny as the Wise who was just murdered. It would have taken him a while. Don’t forget, Neustadt had been browbeating him all night trying to get him to confess to having broken into the Tatarski house as well as all those other houses. And when Wise finally realized what had happened, how he had been used, Mary Tatarski was dead, forgotten, except for Duncan Harvey’s efforts to clear her name. Wise grew to hate Neustadt for his big favour: for letting him go on those terms.”

“Are you saying that Abe Wise killed Neustadt because of what happened forty years ago? Nobody’s going to believe that!”

“Sit down, Mickey. When did I say that Wise did the deed? I know all he had to do was have a quick word with you, or Phil or Syl, but I didn’t say he did. Still, you raise a very good point, one we should all remember: why did the murderer take so long to act? Why the delay? Remember that. What I hope I’ve been able to establish is the connection between Wise and Neustadt running through the Tatarski case.”

“Benny, Duncan Harvey’s been saying that Mary Tatarski was innocent for years. I just wrote a book about it. She shouldn’t have been hanged.”

“You’re right. Both of you deserve a lot of credit. It’s because of you that we know what happened next.”

“What did?” asked Julie, her face still puffy and red from the night before. “What happened to her family?”

“First, they left town and changed their names. There was fallout as there always is after an execution. Margaret, the older daughter, committed suicide after failing to re-establish her life on some firm basis in a new town. Freddy, the youngest, on the other hand came back to Grantham when he was still fairly young and started up a business. He made a success of himself. He started up the Nuts amp; Bolts chain of automobile service centres and made a lot of money.”

“Freddy Tait! Are you saying that Freddy Tait was Mary Tatarski’s brother? I never heard that!” Hart Wise was suddenly taking more of an interest. “He was a great mechanic.”

“But, according to some, he was an unhappy man. He had reason enough to be happy, he had a wife, a son and a lovely, bright stepdaughter, he had a successful business, he had a big house in a nice part of town. Yet it wasn’t enough. The past was still alive for him. He drank. He quarrelled with his stepdaughter so much that she left home. She only returned when she heard that he was dying of cancer. She nursed him through that, and during those long days and nights Freddy told her about the death of her real mother. You can imagine the shock to her. A sudden, unsuspected shock that came just as her stepfather was dying. In a manner of speaking, his death put her in touch with her past.”

“Are you saying that Drina Tait killed Ed Neustadt and Abe Wise?” asked McStu.

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“But where is she? Who knows anything about her?”

“We know more than you think, McStu. But before we go into that, let’s try to trace the cheque that Hart left with his father. It’s a detail that has been bugging me.”

“There wasn’t any money found on or in the deceased’s desk,” Pete said. “So, logically, it was carried away by one of the people who saw Wise after Hart left.”

“I don’t see the mystery,” Julie said. “I told both of you that Daddy gave me a cheque for thirty-five thousand dollars.”

“And that was the amount of the cheque I gave my father,” added Hart.

“Well, Benny? Does that clear up the mystery?” Staziak was looking a little smug.

“Julie, did your father just hand you a cheque that had already been written, or did he write one while you were there?”

“Oh, merde! Yes! He wrote it out! Then what happened to Hart’s cheque?”

“I think I know the answer to that,” I said. I turned to Didier Santerre. “Well, Didier? Julie left you in the Le Baron rent-a-car, the one with the broken headlight. When she got back, you had vanished and didn’t get back for a few minutes. Will you tell us where you were?”

“I was peeing in the bushes, Mr. Cooperman.”

“Oh, you can do better than that. Remember, the cheque went through your bank account. I’m sure it has been traced. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that that bum cheque and a few other financial irregularities have kept you on this side of the Atlantic.”

“Oh, all right! I went into the house to talk to Mr. Wise. We had some business to discuss.”

“You didn’t tell me that!” said Julie, looking at Santerre, who was looking everywhere but at Julie. “What sort of business?”

“Your father wanted to put some money into Mode. It was his idea.”

“So, Julie,” I said, “your father gave you thirty-five thousand, which you turned over to Didier for the magazine. And then he signed over Hart’s cheque and gave that to Didier for the magazine.”

“Lucky magazine!” mused McStu out loud.

“Only half-lucky,” Hart said loudly enough so that we could all hear. “Dad’s cheques were always good. But my cheque was made of India rubber! I intended it to bounce. It was to pay my father off for his goddamned high-handed interference in my life!”

“And that’s why Didier’s bank is unlikely to forget that cheque.”

“Didier!” Julie called, still looking and hoping for a better explanation.

“Shut up, you silly fool!” he said. “Just keep quiet.”

Didier pulled her over towards him, and when she protested, he cuffed her in the face. “You little idiot! Be still!” The sensation of the slap, even the echo, continued in our imaginations for some moments. Julie’s sobbing brought us back to Dorset Crescent.

“It’s good to see that there’s justice in small things, even if not in the large. Hart’s bum cheque scuttled, or half-scuttled, Santerre’s plan to strip Julie Long of her spending money,” I said, wishing there was something to drink within reach.

“Some spending money,” Syl Ryan observed to Mickey.

“You know, Syl, the spending money for both Julie and Hart has changed dramatically. Abe told me that his whole estate, barring a few bequests, is to go to Julie and Hart in equal shares.” Didier Santerre was beginning to look enviously at the woman he had just slapped. I looked over at Hart. “Doesn’t that scheme with the Triumph seem silly, Hart, now that you’ve become a man of substance?”

“I don’t understand what you’re on about, Cooperman.”

“Oh, I think you do. Let’s see, this is a case with two bad cheques in it. Both of them for thirty-five thousand and both with your name at the bottom. You told me that you didn’t know the cheque was bad, and that you had tried to raise the money by selling your things and borrowing from your mother. I don’t know how much she gave you, but you didn’t put it in your bank, you gave it to Gordon Shaw to finance your scam to bilk your father out of as much as his love for you was worth. And all this to recover an Alfa Romeo Canguro from a garage in Southampton. You let Shaw talk big money at you. Your bad cheque, the first one, would be like a kidnapping victim. You knew that your father would redeem it at whatever cost. Unfortunately, Shaw jumped the gun. The numbers he was asking put Wise on guard. They were too big for a little Triumph. Then he took steps to remove the threat. But more about that later.”

“Benny, this is all very well,” said McStu, “but it’s moved a little off topic. Aren’t we looking for Drina Tait?”

“I haven’t lost sight of that. I’m just trying to wade through this mess as tidily as I can. Now, Didier, how did you get into the house? You weren’t seen by anyone.”

“I used the door by the garage. The one Mickey calls a tunnel. It’s just a back door as far as I know. This isn’t Fantômas, you know.”

“Who did you see on your way to and from your meeting with Wise?”

“I saw this young woman.” He indicated Victoria. “She was holding, what do you call it, a rolling-pin.”

“Great detective work, Benny! We already know that she was making pies!”

“Easy, McStu. I’ll try to put everything in its place. Just the way you did in your book. You did your homework. I hope I’m doing mine. Look in your book McStu. Page 39. You’re describing Mary Tatarski’s family. Let me read it for you:

Although this was an immigrant family, with aspirations not unlike those of other newcomers, Anastasia Tatarski tried to imbue her children with as much of the culture of her adopted country as she could …

Do you remember writing that?”

“Sure. The mother really loved the Brits. She used to read to them out of an old public-school history textbook.”

“And she named some of her kids after English sovereigns: Freddy was Alfred in his obituary, named after Alfred the Great.”

“I hope this bedtime story is leading somewhere,” Julie asked, looking a little more composed than when I last noticed her. “I suppose Margaret was named after that mad queen who runs through all of those history plays of Shakespeare? Or was it Princess Margaret with her pretty doll house? And what about Mary? Wasn’t Queen Mary the consort of George the Sixth?”

“Fifth,” said McStu, who had had a good education.

“Right. It’s all in your book. Margaret, Mary and Alfred, or Freddy. Freddy’s son was Charles Edward, after Bonny Prince Charlie, and Drina, the daughter of Mary, was named after the dear queen herself: Alexandrina Victoria.”

“Victoria?” Mickey Armstrong was on his feet. “What are you talking about?”

“Why don’t you ask your wife, Mickey?”

All eyes turned of course to the woman sitting quietly next to Mickey with her hands in her lap. She was smiling slightly.

“Well, Mrs. Armstrong?” prompted Staziak gently.

“What Mr. Cooperman says is absurd,” she said. “Oh, I admit to being Drina Tait. But that was never a great secret. I think I even told you once over lunch, Ben. I hope you still want me to call you Ben. I was brought up in a family on the run. I didn’t know it at the time, but I sensed something. We weren’t like other people. Even in Bracebridge, where I spent my early life. Even though my girlfriends were the daughters of lawyers and judges. We weren’t the same and I never knew why until I came home to be with my father-you call him my stepfather, and that is of course legally correct, but he was the only father I ever knew. That was in the spring of 1991. He told me the story. Congratulations for discovering what many people in this city could have told you.

“As to the question of killing Chief Neustadt and Mr. Wise, don’t be silly. I didn’t know the one, and Mr. Wise has always been very kind and generous to Mickey and me.”

A few heads nodded at the good sense of what they had just heard. Victoria smiled across at me. Mickey tried to comfort her, but she kept her eyes on me.

“Your crime, Victoria, wasn’t like most crimes. It wasn’t motivated by greed or frustration, but by revenge. Neustadt and Wise between them had destroyed your family. You are the only one left. It was up to you. It had nothing to do with like or dislike. It was a pure crime, if you like. You didn’t come into it at all, not as Drina Tait or as Victoria Armstrong. You were simply the instrument of retribution, a settling of accounts, an evening of scores.

“You studied your quarry from afar. It wasn’t hard to learn that Neustadt was an amateur mechanic, who used to tinker with his car in the driveway. You knew about cars yourself. You grew up around cars and grease pits and tools. It was no trick for you to turn the valve on Neustadt’s hydraulic jack. It took someone like you to tamper with the steering on Wise’s Volvo.

“But Wise was a harder nut to crack than Neustadt. He had built a wall around himself. To cross over, you sought him out through your connections in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. You knew enough about cooking to get into the house. You hadn’t planned on Mickey. But it worked out very well. Better than you’d hoped, maybe. Once inside the citadel you found all the weapons you needed ten times over, but how could you kill him with the boys always hovering near? That posed a problem, but you solved it masterfully. You used a silencer. That covered the sound so that the boys could finish their breakfast never dreaming that it was the last of them that Wise would pay for. You left the gun at the scene-over there,” I pointed to the bloodstain still visible on the carpet.

“And what did I do with this silencer you’ve invented?” Victoria asked, her eyes now flashing anger at me. “You searched the house, Sergeant. Did you find this silencer he’s talking about?”

“She’s got you there, Benny. We went through the house several times room by room.”

“I have to admit, you nearly had me there, Victoria. But let me show you how I discovered your secret. Hart, you told me that when you came in to see your father for the last time, Victoria and Mickey were in the kitchen.”

“That’s right. She was baking.”

“And Julie, when you got there some time later?”

“I could smell cinnamon and apple in the kitchen. She was baking pies.”

“Good,” I said. “And Pete, you say you found flour near the body. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes. But since it was Victoria who discovered the body, I don’t see how-”

“Pete, Julie says that she smelled the pies. They were in the oven by the time she got there. How was it that Victoria was still wearing a floury apron after the murder had been committed?”

“I wasn’t wearing an apron. I took it off after I’d tidied the kitchen. I told you that, Sergeant.” Victoria Armstrong said this as though it had figured importantly in her statement. Mickey looked like he was going to lash out at me all the same.

“You better have a good reason for putting us through this, Cooperman,” he said, which came off less effectively than it might have with the women removed from the room. Mickey watched his tongue with women about.

Suddenly everybody was looking at me. I hoped that what I was going to say was made out of the right words. “So, the flour didn’t come from the apron, and yet it was in the room. Could it have come from her shoes, Pete?”

“Not according to the forensic people. It wasn’t connected to a footprint. There were no footprints. The flour-and we’re talking about slight traces, you understand-was evenly distributed in the area where the murder took place.”

“I see. Pete, will you come into the kitchen with me for a minute?” Pete got up and assured the others that we would be right back.

When we returned, Pete was wearing a puzzled expression. “You were baking pies, Mrs. Armstrong, but we don’t seem to be able to find your rolling pin. Can you help us?”

“What has baking pies to do with anything?” asked Hart.

“More than you think,” I said. “Didier told us that Victoria was holding a rolling pin some time after Julie sniffed pies cooking in the oven. What was Victoria doing with a rolling pin after all of the pastry had been rolled out? And the latest of the mysteries: what has happened to the rolling pin?”

“Who gives a damn?” said Syl Ryan, looking at Hart for support.

“Pete, you told me that an effective silencer for a gun like the gun that killed Abe Wise would be a cylinder about eighteen inches long and around two and a half inches in diameter. You didn’t say it, but you might have: a silencer for Wise’s gun would be about the size and shape of a rolling pin without the handles. Drina, we know, was familiar with car motors and the tools in the shop of Freddy Tait’s garage. She would be capable of making such an object, together with the rod and clamp she’d need to install it.”

“Rod and clamp, Benny? I don’t follow you.”

“You need the one to align the exit hole of the silencer with the barrel of the gun, McStu. The clamp holds the silencer firmly on the barrel. Dudley Dickens would have known that.”

“Well! That’s quite a yarn. It’s not proof, of course, but it’s a good story. I may use that silencer idea. I think it might work in fiction, but Benny, this is real life, for Gawd sake!”

“Yes,” said Hart. “Lots of people had access to the kitchen, just as they had to the guns.”

“And what about that shot through the window at Wise?” asked Pete. “And the one at you,” he added as an afterthought.

“You already know about the tunnel, Pete A shot from near the garage into this room could have the shooter back inside the house within a minute at the outside.”

“Cooperman, I’m going to get you for what you said here tonight!” It was Mickey’s red face that was glowering at me.

“I’m just doing my job, Mickey. And if I were you I wouldn’t stray away from your wife right now. It could be-” Just then we heard a sudden cry. Victoria had jumped over the arm of the couch and come down on Julie’s foot. Before Julie had recovered, Victoria was in the kitchen. Pete was the first off the mark. He moved after her with astonishing speed. By the time I got past the preparation table in the middle of the kitchen, they were both gone.

“The tunnel!” Syl Ryan shouted, and started in after her. To the hounds a quarry is a quarry, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a fox or a hare.

The tunnel didn’t do justice to its name. There was nothing mysterious about it: just another back way out that happened to run down a set of stairs and come out near the garage. From a distance away, we could hear raised voices, sounds of a struggle. “Let me through!” shouted Mickey, shoving both Pete and a uniformed man aside. But before he could get to the stairs, Syl Ryan came up, followed by two men in uniform carrying a struggling Victoria Armstrong between them.