Getting Away With Murder

TWENTY-NINE

The Queen Elizabeth Way was built to commemorate the visit in 1939 of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. It was at that time the finest divided highway in North America. It was still the fastest way to get from Grantham to Toronto, Hamilton or, as in this case, Grimsby. I pushed the Olds along at a good clip, keeping the lake to my right and the beetling escarpment to my left. Also on my left ran miles and miles of vineyards and orchards. There was pink blush about the naked twigs. Buds? I couldn’t tell. Once I turned off the familiar highway, I was in strange country. I didn’t know these quiet roads or streets. I tried to keep to the directions Mr. McCarthy had given me on the phone a day or so ago when I first talked to him. Pete had got the number for me and it took me the better part of a week to get the nerve to call it.

The house was small, with a muddy driveway leading up to a tin garage with a door hanging halfway open or closed, whichever way you wanted to look at it. I parked the Olds in the driveway behind a beat-up blue Pontiac. looked about the same age as the other cars parked in driveways and along the treeless street. There was mud on my shoes when I mounted the porch of the sunblasted, artificial-brick-sided bungalow. The mat looked too new for the shoe-cleaning I had in mind, so I did what I could on the edge of the top step, leaving the mat for a final polish. I rang the bell, and heard the ring resounding through what appeared from the outside to be an empty house. On the second try, I could hear footsteps coming up from the basement. A dark form came between me and the light coming through a long hall from a back window and dusty lace curtains.

“Yes?” said the man who opened the door about as wide as it would go. The man I was looking at was eighty. I’d figured out his present age from an article on his retirement in a Toronto paper. In the flesh, he looked older. He was a tall, rangy man, with lines on his face that were closer to furrows than wrinkles. There was a worried bloodhound expression on his features as he took in what he saw standing in front of him. Was he sizing up my height and estimating my weight, I wondered.

“I’m Cooperman. Remember? I phoned.”

“Cooperman? I don’t …” He rubbed a grizzled grey beard with the back of his hand while he tried to recall the conversation.

“You are Mr. McCarthy, aren’t you?”

“That’s right, but my memory is starting to go. They told me it would and now I guess I’ll have to believe them. Will you come in, Mr. Cooperman?” He moved away from the door and I followed him into the front room of the tiny house, which was decorated with brownish prints of sailing ships and sea captains in nor’westers. Next to the front window was a table with a fringed cloth on it. A bowl of nuts was its only decoration. A velvet wall-hanging of a stag at bay dominated the space above an upright piano with its lid closed.

“Make yourself at home, Mr. Cooperman, and try to give me an idea of why you are calling on a gaffer like me on a nice day like this. You’re not a reporter, are you? I don’t talk to reporters, you know.” I tried to remind him of our conversation and he nodded from time to time as though what I was saying was striking chords in his head.

“Mary Tatarski!” he said with some surprise. “Yes, I remember her very well. It’s the recent things I have trouble with. Mary Tatarski was back in December of 1952. That was a crowded week. I’d just come back from Toronto, where I’d hanged two bank robbers who shot a policeman. No! I did them after I did Mary Tatarski. It was a Thursday and then the next Tuesday, if I remember right. What do you want to know about her? I’ve signed the Official Secrets Act, you know. I’m no gossip.”

“Did she make any confession at the end? Did she say anything that gave any indication as to guilt or innocence?” McCarthy looked up at the ceiling with its smooth cool plaster sheen, as though the memory could be found there.

“You understand, there’s not much talk,” he said in a low confidential voice. I wondered about how much he could expect me to understand about his work. What was the given here? How much did he think was common knowledge? Maybe I should have asked him.

“Yes, I know. I just thought that-”

“A lot of them tell you they didn’t do it. They think I won’t hang ’em if they protest their innocence. I remember one time, in Calgary, I think it was-. But I’m sworn to uphold the law and I have my duty to perform. Guilty or innocent: it’s all the same to me. Let them tell the lawyers and the judges about that. It’s too late when they send for me. Although I’ve had a few false alarms in my day. They pay me half, when I don’t have to go through with it. It makes no nevermind to me. And I’m just as glad they made me put away my little bag of tricks. I’m like most people in this country I don’t believe in it any more. The times have changed. You can’t go against that.”

“What about Mary Tatarski?”

“She went to the drop as bravely as I’ve ever seen a man go. Not swaggering. I don’t mean that. But steady, if you know what I mean. I remember now!” he said, leaning towards me as though he had just been given an electric shock. “She made me do something I try to avoid. It’s been one my rules. Makes it easier afterwards. I try not to let them catch my eyes. You don’t want to have bad dreams, you know; bad enough as it is, but you don’t want the eye contact. It’ll give you the blue devils, I’ll tell you. Well, I broke my rule. She looked me in the eye, while Wilkes was strapping her legs together and I was about to cover her face, and she said, calm as ever you please, and with a sort of quiet smile, ‘I had no hand in the death of my mother.’ She didn’t say it swearing to God, like some of them do, but just flat out and looking me in the eye, ‘I had no hand in the death of my mother.’ I gave her a nod so as to show I understood and would remember what she said. Then she shook her head a little and opened her eyes wide and whispered, ‘It was different with Papa. He kept me from seeing Thaddeus.’ That’s all. She smiled to show she was finished talking. And then I did the necessary and that was the end of it.” The necessary! All trades have their jargon. The necessary! Is that how he remembers it from that December night forty-two years ago? Are the mental pictures from that night among the lost or discarded memories of this old man? I hoped they were, but I wouldn’t have bet on it. It was more likely he’d already forgotten my name than the events of that night.

“And was it the truth? With all your experience, what did you think at the time?” He looked me straight in the eye. I couldn’t help thinking of Mary Tatarski looking into the eyes of her executioner.

“I was sure I was hanging an innocent woman that night. I still think so. And I’ve faced more murderers on the point of death than any man living. But that last bit always bothered me. Never could figure that out.” We both sat in silence for a few moments. If he was going to add anything, he didn’t need me to cue him.

“Did you know the former deputy chief of police, Ed Neustadt?’

”I knew him,” he said without emphasis. That in itself was a give-away.

“Was he there?”

“Neustadt was always there. In Ontario, anyway. He once turned up in Montreal. He had no business … But I guess he had connections.”

“What did you make of him?”

“None of my affair to make anything of him. And now he’s dead …” He let the idea trail off. I could tell that Mr. McCarthy didn’t like Neustadt. He and everybody else I’d met.

“Did he get in the way?”

“He had no business there at all. I spoke to the jail people, but they couldn’t stop him. These things are best then kept simple. There shouldn’t be anyone there who’s not part of it. It’s not a show. But you can’t keep some of them away. Neustadt was the biggest pest of all. He wanted to speak to the prisoner, but I wouldn’t let him. I told him to stand aside. I was sharp with him. I didn’t care if he was the prime minister. He had no business there that night.”

“Thank you, Mr. McCarthy. You’ve told me what I couldn’t find out from any other source.”

“Glad to help. Always glad. Most people want to know whether the people I’ve hanged suffered. Hell, I know my craft! I wouldn’t keep them waiting any longer than I needed to. There are tricks to the whole thing, you see. Nothing you can learn in five minutes. It took me years to get it just right. And hanging a woman’s no picnic, I’ll tell you. Givers of life and all that. The fellow before me was a real bungler, but you had to sympathize. He didn’t have much to go on. There’s only been ten women hanged since Confederation. That makes a hell of a poor pool of experience, I’ll tell you. No records, no facts to pass on for those who came after. No way to get a handle on it. No wonder he was a bungler. I tried to do better. I studied it, like. Talked to that fellow who kept a pub at Hoole, in England. The Rose and Crown. Used to keep one called Help the Poor Struggler, but he sold that. Small wonder. He retired before they abolished hanging. Had enough of it.” I could see that Mr. McCarthy was a mine of information, Official Secrets or not.

“Old Pierrepoint, that was his name. He told me of one time when a client he was just about to top looked him in the eye and said: ‘The sentence is just, but the evidence was wrong.’ How do you like that for a summing up, Mr. Cooperman?”

I nodded; it did sum things up. In general and for me. While the hangman spoke, my memory had been reaching back through these past chilly March days. It came to rest at the name Duncan Harvey thought I wouldn’t remember: Thaddeus Nemerov, the boy next door.

I began making movements to show that I was finished. I thanked him again for his help.

“Would you like a glass of beer with me?” He asked so tentatively that I couldn’t say no. Not everybody’s idea of good company, the last official hangman. He went into the back of the house and came out with two bottles and glasses on a tray. He told me that he was keeping house for himself since the death of his wife some years ago. He opened the first of the bottles and shared out the beer into the glasses. We nodded at one another and drank. I needed the drink more than I would have guessed. The inquiry I was concluding had made this visit and my questions necessary, just as McCarthy’s job made the hanging of Mary Tatarski necessary. “The necessary,” in fact. I had been looking for a murderer and he had punished one. Or had he? Had she been able at that terrible moment to look into the eyes of the hangman and lie? That was the question I pondered while the hangman poured out the second bottle of beer.