The Suicide Murders

SIXTEEN

At three o’clock in the morning, Sergeant Savas and I started looking for coffee. St. Andrew Street was tight as a drum, and all of the usual places that either of us could think of were sensibly shut down and their operators in bed. Savas thought I was trying to be funny when I offered him a dried apricot. I always thought it would be a good idea to keep a bottle in the bottom drawer of my desk or in the filing cabinet, but with Frank Bushmill for a neighbour, and me for a tenant, it wasn’t necessary.

The Sergeant had arrived a few minutes after they’d carted Frank off to the hospital. In the movies and on television, a bump on the head is a temporary inconvenience. It doesn’t hold the hero up for long, and the rest of the cast bounce back just as quickly. Savas looked around my place, not taking things very seriously, since I hadn’t reported the loss of the Kohinoor diamond, or the Crown Jewels. He had the edges of the puzzle that was bugging me stuck in his teeth, like bits of his dinner, and he wanted me to tell him what was going on. He didn’t say that in so many words, but all those scowls couldn’t have been indigestion.

“C’mon,” he said, and I followed him out into a fine ran, that reflected the stoplights and street signs in a way that made me turn up my collar. The Sandman had already dumped a truckload of dirt in both my eyes, and every bone in my body cried out to be laid to rest. Instead, we got into the Sergeant’s car and I could hear the hiss of the tires on the wet road. I didn’t much care where he was going. I think I even closed my eyes for a minute, because when I felt the car stop, I could feel my mouth shouting for a toothbrush. It was cold and nearly dawn on a day I knew I would want to forget.

I couldn’t tell where we were, but Savas seemed to know what he was doing. He knocked on a door in a one-storey frame building that came a car-length from the edge of the sidewalk. The door was opened by a short fat man with the shortest arms I’d ever seen on a grown man.

“How are you, Lije?” he said without a great deal of warmth.

“Good morning, Chris. Come on in. You’re up early. I was just thinking of closing up. Nothing much doing.”

“This Lije Swift, Mr. Cooperman. Lije is short for Elijah. He’s a regular prophet, aren’t you, Lije. Mr. Cooperman here got himself burgled tonight while he was out burgling somebody else. You got any coffee hot?” He let us into a large dining room full of family-sized dining room tables, not the usual restaurant tables, and we both collapsed into Lije’s antique press-back chairs.

“Okay, Mr. Cooperman,” he said with his eyelids half closed, “what are you going to tell me about tonight? I don’t want any stories, I don’t want to hear any garbage, just the facts, like they say on TV. I know that I’m looking at a small part of something a lot bigger. Can you tell me anything to set my mind at rest? I want get some sleep just as much as you do, but I know I won’t sleep until I hear you say your piece.” Lije brought over two large ironstone mugs of coffee. It was the best I’ve ever tasted. Savas knew that too. Savas was a good cop. He was a cop twenty-four hours a day and he knew about coffee.

“I can’t tell you who I’m working for, and I shouldn’t tell you that I’ve already had my ass kicked for asking too many questions and not letting the dead bury their dead. It started with Chester Yates. He shot himself. That’s what it said on television and in the papers. I know, they have all the usual suicide evidence, but you know as well as I do that there are a few ways to make a murder look like suicide.”

He was watching me, with the big hands wrapped around his mug and nodding in time with my disclosures. I took another sip, already beginning to feel better. “When I mentioned this to the boys in Homicide, they thought I was messing their bed. They liked it as suicide, I can’t blame them. But then a couple of days later Dr. Andrew Zekerman also gets dead, this time from a bash on the head with a traditional blunt instrument. Zekerman is a shrink. Chester Yates was one of his patients and guess whose file is missing from the doctor’s office. Here’s another one to try on. A girl named Elizabeth Tilford used to work in Chester’s office. Two months ago she disappeared and hasn’t been seen since. And behind all these deaths and disappearances is the shadow of a man who was a friend and former business partner of Chester, the boy-friend on the quiet of the girl and the last name that Zekerman told me on the phone two hours before somebody addled his brains for him permanently. There are a lot of questions I would like to get answers for, and I’m bucking a stiff wind blowing from City Hall. If I don’t come up with some answers soon, I’m going to have my licence revoked in jig time.”

“Tell me, Cooperman, who’s the guy you think ties up all these threads?”

“I can’t go public on that, Savas. I don’t have a breath of proof.”

“This public you can go. I’m telling you that, and I don’t tell that and then make a report.”

“The mayor has a special assistant named Bill Ward.” Savas gave a low whistle, and bit his lower lip, which turned into a lopsided grin in about ten seconds.

“Interesting,” he said, nodding, “very interesting.”

“So Phoebe Campbell got me out of the way tonight so that she or a pal could go through my office. Only one thing is missing. Before he died, Zekerman mailed me these.” Here I took the photograph and the clipping from my inside breast pocket. He glanced at the photograph, and scanned the clipping, then, after another look at the picture, looked up at me again. “He also sent me a few pages of jottings from his office. They looked like the sort of notes a shrink might take during a session of therapy. I was going to get a G.P. friend of mine to translate them into English for me this morning. I’ll have to cancel that now. Too bad. They were important enough for somebody to go to a lot of trouble to get.”

There was a slate-coloured sky looking in the front window of Lije’s place. The coffee mugs were empty. I was wool-gathering. Savas had been talking and I’d missed the first part of what he was saying. I saw his mouth making the words, all right, but my own depression made reception difficult. He was talking about Lije Swift.

“He used to run a fast boat above the falls during the prohibition years in the States. The American Coast Guard used to boast that if they didn’t nab him, the falls would. He ran his boat full of bootleg Canadian whiskey from below Chippewa. For a while he was a driver for a bunch of high-jackers, and drove a car right into the 1960s that had bullet holes in the back from the Provincial police.” He was talking in a drone, his voice scarcely above a whisper. The story heard some other time would have been a good story. I’m not knocking Savas for trying to bring in the new day with fresh information on bootlegging operations on the border way back then. The only effect it had on me was that prohibition made some people on both sides of the border rich, and it was almost bad manners in some circles to mention that the families who made those big bucks owed so much to men like Lije Swift, who ended up running a roadhouse through the small hours of the morning.

Lije gave us both a friendly send-off. He brought over to our table a couple of eight by ten glossies of himself with his short arms around the sculptured shoulders of a late great screen sex symbol. He told us that she was a real lady, easily switching her order from roast veal to steak when the veal was overdone. A real nice lady.

Back in the car, Savas wasn’t saying anything. He started the motor and a cigarette, and backed up onto the road. I watched our return to the city carefully, because I didn’t have a glimmer about where we’d been. Some village on the Niagara River below the falls, with signs written in old script offering antiques for sale. There still wasn’t much traffic on the road. The windshield wipers were able to make enough of the rain to keep the window clear, but it was a near thing. Out toward the industrial mile, where the grim line of black plants made a mockery of the orchards next door to them, the depression in the view would have brought tears to the eyes of Genghis Khan. I watched Savas’ car straddle the railway tracks that ran along the road for a quarter of a mile. Soon he ran his car up behind my car and I got out. I was a little surprised that he got out too, and he came around on my side, so that I rolled the window down to hear what he had to say. I started up the motor, and set the wipers to work. I could see Savas’ breath in the fine rain.

“Cooperman, a few hours ago I didn’t see much more that a comic opera where you’re concerned, but what you said about what’s going on in this town made sense to me. I’d like to say I’d help you but there isn’t diddly I could do for you now except not running you in. Keep in touch. Meanwhile, I’ll be reading the papers, because when this breaks I can see a lot of the houses over on Mortgage Hill starting to rattle. As long as it comes up all clean goods, I’m going to break my sides laughing. Well, good night. Oh, yeah, one more thing I meant to tell you about. We had to check out the ownership of that house you walked into. Don’t tell anybody that it was me that told it to you, but the owner of the house at 186 Bellevue Terrace is William Allen Ward. Sleep on it.”