Getting Away With Murder

NINE

I called the Upper Canadian Bank and got nowhere trying to talk to the Bill MacLeod who was dealing with Hart Wise’s antique-car problems. By pretending that I knew more than I did, I fooled him into letting slip a few names, and details new to me. Crumbs from head table, really; but that’s what my job is: picking up crumbs and trying to get them to say something.

I telephoned the secret number that Wise had given me, partly to show him that I was on the job and also to show him that I was penetrating beneath the skin of his family life. Maybe he would have second thoughts about our early-morning meeting. Maybe he’d tell me to go to hell. I was hoping he would, as a matter of fact. I was getting tired of running into Mickey Armstrong every time I looked up from my coffee cup.

“Who the hell gave you this number?” he shouted at me. Good, I thought, now I’ll be cut loose and returned to civilian life.

“You did, Mr. Wise. Yesterday morning. This is Benny. Benny Cooperman. Remember in the very early morning?”

“All right. All right! What’s your problem? This better be good.”

“What can you tell me about Hart and his antique Triumph?”

“Are you telling me that Hart’s behind this plot to kill me? I don’t believe it!”

“I’m not saying anything of the kind. I’m just trying to find my way in a family I’d scarcely heard of when I went to bed last night. Are you having second thoughts?”

“No, damn it! I’ve got too much riding on this. You want to know about Hart’s car?”

“The antique Triumph-”

“The TR2. I know the machine. It’s the 1954 model. A peach of a car. Reminds me of the Morgan I once wanted and couldn’t afford. What do you want to know about it?”

“I want to know how the car became a headache. The bank won’t tell me anything. They are bothering Paulette about it. How has it soured things between you and your son?”

“Hart fell in love with the car and bought it from a dealer without checking on his bank balance. He wrote a bad cheque. The dealer went to his lawyer, the lawyer saw that this was a chance to involve me, so he served a writ on Hart. I have friends in this town, Mr. Cooperman. That’s how I found out about it. Knowledge is my armour. Of course Hart was furious. He didn’t want me to know anything about the business. He wanted to handle it himself. It was a stupid mistake, but the lawyer’s trying to make a federal case of it. They’re getting at me through Hart, but the boy thinks I’m interfering in his life again. As a father, I can’t do anything right. I tried to give him the money to cover the overdraft, but that only made things worse. He won’t make himself admit that he’s being used as a pawn to get at me.”

“Are you and Hart on speaking terms?” He thought a moment before answering.

“I try to remain on cordial terms with both my children.”

“But that’s easier said than done.”

“Some day, Mr. Cooperman, you’ll have children.”

“These children-not mine, but yours-are well into their thirties, Mr. Wise. They have left home, have formed attachments, I suppose, and even bounce the occasional cheque. Maybe it’s time you stopped treating them like children?”

“I hired you as an investigator, Cooperman, not a sob-sister! When I want your advice about matters other than my life and death, I’ll send Mickey around to tell you. In the meantime, stick to your damned job!”

“Speaking of Mickey, I want to talk to him. I’m not having an easy time getting his ear.”

“I’m beginning to wonder whether your services weren’t over-sold, Mr. Cooperman. But, I’ll have a word with Mickey. I trust him as I trust few others. He’s a good man, and more enterprising than most. Is that all?”

“Tell me about your will. Who gets your money?”

“My visible assets and as many of the invisible ones that survive probate go to Hart and Julie in equal shares.

In the event of the death of either, the remaining child inherits everything. There are some fairly sizeable gifts to institutions, charities and people close to me, but the bulk of it goes to Hart and Julie. Is there anything else you need?”

“I can’t think of anything. Oh, yes, Lily won’t talk to me.”

“I hear what you’re saying. I’ll look after it. I can’t promise anything with Lily. Never could. If there’s nothing else, I’ve got to go. It’s a busy, day and there’s a funeral I have to attend.”

“Would that be the one for the former deputy police chief? I wouldn’t have guessed that you were all that close.”

“We weren’t, my friend. But having an unsavoury reputation has this peculiar advantage. When I turn up at Neustadt’s funeral, everybody will think he was a bigger son of a bitch than he was, which is going some.”

“I guess you crossed swords more than once?”

“Once was enough! Now, I don’t have time to banter with you, Cooperman. Goodbye!” I got my ear away from the phone just in time to save my eardrum from rough use. I was glad that I wasn’t in daily contact with Abe Wise. I don’t think I could take it.

I knew when I bought it that I should have spent some time seriously looking at McKenzie Stewart’s new book. As the only living author of my acquaintance within a hundred miles or even a thousand, he was bound to run into me sooner or later. Sooner, if I hadn’t read his book. That’s the way the laws of probability work around here. I was right. He was coming out of Christopher’s Smoke Shop with a couple of foreign newspapers under his arm and a fresh pouch of pipe tobacco, which he was tearing open with complete absorption.

“Ah, Benny!” he said, putting a big brown hand on my shoulder. “How are things in the world of crime?”

“McStu!” I said. “I just bought your new book this morning,” I lied. McStu, when he wasn’t writing crime novels, was teaching English or Creative Writing at Secord University up on the Escarpment. He also travelled a lot lecturing on black writers.

“Thank God somebody bought it!” he said emphatically. “It might as well be you. I told them that nobody’s going to buy that book, Benny. Nobody.”

“But it’s a local story, isn’t it?”

“Well, we’ll sell a few around Grantham. But Grantham isn’t the world. My U.S. publisher wasn’t interested. My English publisher said he’d skip this one. So all I’ve got to look to are Canadian sales. What did you think of it?”

“I … I’ve just started it,” I said, stammering. “The beginning is great!” I said as enthusiastically as I could.

“Yeah, I got all that stuff about the execution from the hangman himself, an old gaffer named McCarthy, who lives in Grimsby. And three guards who are still around told me things.”

“You really think she was innocent?”

“Hell, Benny, all I can say I said in that damned book. What it boils down to is the fact that I don’t think the Crown made its case. There wasn’t complete disclosure of the police evidence to the defence or to the Crown. Oh, it was a miscarriage of justice all right. No two ways about that. That Neustadt fellow, the old cop who died this week, kept his witnesses writing statements until they said what he wanted them to say. The defence never saw the early versions. Duncan’s still trying to get the case reopened, you know?”

“Duncan Harvey, the architect. Yeah. What does he get out of this?” Today I was suspicious of everybody.

“Duncan’s the last of the good guys, Benny. A genuine concerned citizen. Last of a dying breed. He writes letters to the editor and even sits through City Council meetings. Amazing man. There’s a crown on high waiting for Dunc. He’s been trying to do something about the Tatarski case for years.”

“I can’t see what good it will do. They can’t give the woman her life back, can they?”

“But, you see, Benny, they can remember what happened to Mary Tatarski the next time they think they have an open-and-shut case. Nothing in life is simple. Making mistakes is what we do best.”

“You got time for a coffee, McStu?”

“Lay on, Macduff!”

Less than five minutes later we were seated facing one another in the middle section of the Diana Sweets with the hope of coffee moving in our direction.

“How did you get involved doing a book that didn’t have Dud Dickens in it?” I asked.

“Dud was getting on my nerves. I wanted to change the rules just for one book before I went back to him. I needed a sabbatical. Then Dunc offered to let me see what he had in his files. By the way, Benny, I’m almost finished a new Dud for your Christmas stocking. Don’t worry.”

“I wish I could talk to you intelligently about the Tatarski book, McStu, but I just bought it.”

“When you’ve finished reading the book, we’ll tear it apart together, okay?”

“What kind of reviews is it getting?”

“Toronto papers liked it. Local reviewer complained I got street names wrong. There was a letter in The Globe accusing me of being the latest bleeding heart to burst into bloom in southern Ontario. There were letters in the Beacon too. Interestingly enough, one of them was from Ed Neustadt, the cop who did the original investigation.”

“Interesting.”

“Speaking of cops, have you seen those two sergeants of yours lately? I need to talk to one of them about a technical point in my new book.”

“Savas is on holiday. I think he’s gone back to Cyprus for a few weeks. But Staziak is still around.”

“Good! I’ll give him a call.” Coffee had by now arrived and soon McStu was telling me about the latest Hamilton harbour scandal and how he was using a thinly veiled version of it in his novel in the works. I took a long shot and asked:

“Is Abe Wise involved in that?”

“Name one dirty deal within this hemisphere that Abe Wise doesn’t have a thumb in, and I’ll eat the rest of his digits.”

“How close is he to the action this time?”

“He has made a lot of people angry, Benny. That, I admit, is unusual for the old smoothy. Shee-it, he could get himself killed. You see it’s not just money running on this, it’s reputations. And people will go farther to protect their names than they will for a dirty buck.”

“I’ll remember that. How does he get away with it, McStu?”

“Wise has a legitimate business running parallel to all of his crooked ones. Keeps the cops guessing. For some reason the local cops have never bothered him much. He must buy a lot of tickets to their annual ball. I don’t know.”

“How is Cath?” McStu’s new wife, Catherine Bracken, read the evening news on the local TV station. I’d been hired a few months ago to keep an eye on her. It was the best job I ever had.

“We’re expecting a baby, Benny. I guess it’s okay to tell you. You’re practically family.”

“Congratulations to both of you! When’s the big day?”

“Cath is going to work right up to the middle of June and then take time off to get ready.”

“That’s wonderful! Give her my love.”

“I will. I will,” he said and we drank our coffees silently for a few minutes, trying to think of something to say that wouldn’t be an anticlimax after news like that. Neither of us could, so we continued to drink in silence.

A few minutes after McStu pulled himself away with the lame excuse that he had students to meet up at Secord, I walked back down James Street to the library and spent twenty minutes reading up on the Letters to the Editor going back to the weeks following the appearance of the first reviews of McStu’s Mary Tatarski book. I wasn’t surprised to find the one signed Deputy Chief of Police Edwin Neustadt, Niagara Regional Police (retired) so easily.

Sirs,

I am astonished that your paper has given room for a review of Haste to the Gallows by McKenzie Stewart. I was intimately involved with the original investigation of this case and find that all attempts to lift it into the realms of the exotic or sensational are ridiculous. It only serves to titillate morbid unhealthy appetites. It was a very ordinary case. There was nothing at all remarkable about any of the people concerned. Yet the present author is trying to make us believe that the woman involved was executed without a thorough investigation or fair trial. I object to this view in the strongest terms. Mary Tatarski was a headstrong, abandoned creature, who would have killed anyone who stood in the way of her wilfulness. The best thing that can be said in her favour, which the defence had ample opportunity to say at the trial, is that Anastasia Tatarski was an old-fashioned woman, who objected to having her daughter away from the house until all hours, leaving her infant child in her care. If this is ignorance and backwardness, I think we could do with more of it more than forty years after that poor woman’s violent and premature death. Killing her mother may have been the crime for which Mary Tatarski suffered, but it must, in all fairness, be remembered that her father, Joseph Tatarski, a veteran just back from the reconquest of Europe, was also murdered under that same roof. It is incredible that weak-kneed sentimentalists have nothing better to do than try to create martyrs from such twisted human rubbish …

I came away from the library with half a wish to have known more about this moralizing deputy chief of police. I guess it was at that moment that I decided to take the time, a couple of hours later in the afternoon, to go to Neustadt’s funeral. Unless he had been kidding, Wise would be there. It would be a good opportunity to observe the intensity of Wise’s feelings about the dead man. It would be a further insight into Wise. God knows I needed all the insights that I could get.