The Suicide Murders

TWO

It was two-thirty, and the day had turned from hot to hotter. I was flipping through a pile of paperbacks in a bookstore with a clear view across the street to the big glass doors of the Caddell Building. In my pocket was an eight-and-a-half-by-ten glossy of Chester Yates in a hard-hat shaking hands with the mayor, also wearing a hard-hat and with a vote-getting grimace. Both of them managed to look as though wearing hard-hats wasn’t regularly part of their day. Chester wore a three-piece out-oftown suit. His big frame needed all the help a tailor could give it. At about two-forty, just when I was getting re-acquainted with Miss Wonderly on page five of The Maltese Falcon, Chester came out the double doors and blinked in the sunlight. He wasn’t wearing a hat, but I thought I might be able to follow his blond head through a crowd anyway.

I let him go about a half a block ahead of me. I thought I could keep tabs on him without endangering the backs of his imported brown shoes. He didn’t look around once. From behind, as he wove in and out of the pedestrians and waiting at the end of the block for the light to change, he looked like an ex-football player going to flab gently. He wasn’t carrying a lot of beer fat on him, but his muscles were turning to marmalade. We were back on St. Andrew Street again, heading west, with the one-way traffic on the main street running against us.

At the newspaper office they’d been very helpful when I asked for the photograph. I’d seen it in the paper a couple of days earlier. The woman with the pink hair behind the desk thought it was just wonderful that I wanted a picture of Mayor Rampham. Thought I set a good example and didn’t care who knew it. I listened patiently until she finished and still had to pay up two dollars for the print.

Chester had stopped in front of a sporting-goods store. The window was filled with baseballs, baseball mitts, a selection of bats, bikes, golfing things and in front of everything, an assortment of imported English toys, model cars, trucks and buses. Chester pulled at his chin for a second, then entered to store. Through the glass I could see him talking to the owner. He was too old to be a salesclerk. They went to the back of the store among the bicycles and bicycle parts where they jawed for about ten minutes. The owner walked him to the door and I preceded my suspect west along the north side of the street, until I stopped to eject a stone from my shoe and he passed me again.

With the single stop at the sporting-goods store, Chester had gone in a straightforward manner to Ontario Street, where he walked north past the green expanse of Montecello Park with its bandstand gleaming in the sun, and little kids running around while their mothers gossiped on the park benches. Chester kept to the sidewalk, maintained a steady pace-not too fast, although I’m out of shape and wheeze after sharpening a pencil-and went into the Physicians’ and Surgeons’ Building across from the Hotel Dieu Hospital. It was one of the newer buildings on the street. It has replaced a hundred-year-old mansion with sixteen-foot ceilings and peacocks painted on the inside shutters. About twenty-five years ago, my mother sent me to take drawing lessons from a painter who lived in the dying mansion. The things you remember.

Chester sat down in the open vinyl splendour of the lobby. I was sure he hadn’t spotted me so I marched in too. The cushion breathed out as I sat down behind a plastic yucca plant. Chester looked at his watch, frowned and picked up a magazine. There was traffic in and out of the gift shop near the entrance, but the air conditioning kept the heat and noise outside. At three o’clock on the nose, Chester got up and pushed one of the eight-hundred buzzers on the solid marble wall by the elevators. It buzzed back, he said something and a voice croaked through a speaker. Chester went up the elevator to the tenth floor. I went over to the wall and tried to locate the right button. It had been fourth or fifth from the top in the third row. The fourth was a Dr. Chisholm on the eighth floor. The fifth was Dr. Andrew Zekerman on the tenth. There was a pay phone in the lobby. I looked up the worthy Dr. Zekerman and discovered that he was a psychia trist. I could also see that I was going to have to return at least ten of those twenty-dollar bills.

I killed exactly fifty-five minutes in the gift shop looking at quilted mauve dressing gowns and bed jackets, avoiding the hostile stare of the lady with her glasses on a string behind the glass counter. Zekerman wasn’t giving away any free time by my watch. At fourteen minutes to the hour, Chester came down from the tenth floor. Playing a hunch, I let him walk out the glass doors, leaving his tail behind him. If he had another secret, it could wait until next Thursday. In another five minutes, a stringy, fortyish woman with sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat came in. At exactly four o’clock, she pushed Dr. Zekerman’s buzzer and rode up to the tenth floor.

I mentally noted “solved” on the file of the Chester Yates caper, and walked back to the office. I ducked into Diana Sweets for a chopped egg sandwich and a marshmallow sundae. Across from me, in an identical brown gumwood booth, Willy Horner was half-way through a hot hamburger sandwich. I’ve been living away from my mother’s kitchen for over seventeen years, and I still think that the gravy is the wickedest part. Willy nodded at me, I nodded back at him. We’d been in grade eight together. That’s the way it is in a small city like this, you never really loss sight of anybody. That was the year the manual training teacher announced to me, “Cooperman, you’ve got two speeds: Slow and Stop. Who are you trying to fool? You people don’t make carpenters.” On the way back to my bench I thought of one, but decided the hell with it. He was right, the breadboard I’d been working on for the last eight weeks was lopsided.

Once back in my office, I decided not to call Mrs. Yates. In the morning, it would look as though I’d earned at least half of what she had advanced me. Dr. Bushmill’s door was open. I walked into his empty waiting room. The good Irish doctor was where I saw him last, with a glass in his hand and a noggin of rye mostly in the doctor.

“Hello, Benny, how’s the boy?” he grinned at me, missing eye contact by several focal lengths. “Sit down and have a jar.” I sat down, and filled a reasonably clean glass-which on balance was also reasonably dirty-with about three fingers of rye. He did up a bottle a day, starting right after his last patient left, and not closing the door until it was gone, around nine or ten. The office smelled like most doctors’ surgeries, but this one had a stale smell of old wood, old medicine, old magazines and Frank Bushmill added to it. The word on the street was that Frank was gay, but to me he just looked miserable. My mother was always trying to get me to bring him home for a good meal. He could use one, but let her invite him on her own time.

“What are you reading, Benny?” His fingers around the glass were yellow with nicotine and the fingernails ridged and thick. “Did you look up that Simenon book I was telling you about? He’s the deep one. And everybody thinks he’s just a detective story writer. Did you know that Gide was writing about him at the time of his death? That’s a fact. Have you read Gide at all?”

“I’m still working my way through the Russians.” Slowly.

“Gogol,” he said, rolling his eyes with meaning that didn’t need further elucidation, except to me. “It’s all in his Overcoat. You know that?”

“Whose overcoat?” I’d lost him.

“Gogol’s.”

“Ahhh,” I said, nodding sagely. I sat a minute more, looking at the shining instruments in their glass cases, and then drank up quickly. “Well,” I said, “I’d better be off. Thanks for the drink.”

“Anytime, Benny. Anytime. Good night.” He didn’t get up, just went on staring at the spot I’d been sitting in.

“Good night,” I said.

I closed the office door behind me and looked up Lou Gelner’s number. Dr. Lou was a pal, and he knew everybody.

“Hello.”

“Lou, it’s Benny Cooperman.”

“Hi, Benny, how’s it hanging? What can I do you for?”

“Lou, what do you know about a Dr. Andrew Zekerman?”

“He’s a shrink. What’s to know? Has an office across from Hotel Dieu and sees a flood of patients every day.”

“What else?”

“That’s it. He’s not cheap. He’s sort of popular right now. You know, if there’s a vogue in shrinks, this is his year. How’m I doing? You hear the one about the New Zealander and the plaster-caster, Benny?”

“Save it. Whenever you start to ramble on the phone, I know you’re wearing a little rubber finger glove on your right hand.”

“A regular Sherlock Holmes, Benny. I never let my right hand know what my left hand’s doing. If you pick up a dose, call me.” I put down the phone for a minute, lit up a smoke with the last match in the office, and broke down and called my mother.

“Hello, Ma?”

“It’s you. I’m watching the news.”

“I thought I’d come over tonight. What are you doing?”

“I told you, I’m watching the news.”

“Well, if you’re not doing anything special.thought …”

“Benny, it’s only Thursday night. You can’t wait for Friday? It’s only one more day. Your brother should drop in as often as you do. I got to go. Goodbye.”

I stared at my yellow pad for a minute and then decided to take a run over to my mother’s place just the same. She sounded a little down to me. I closed up the shop and walked to the stairs.

“Good night, Frank.”

“Good night, Benny.”

My car was parked behind the building. I went down the lane to where I’d left the Olds. For once I wasn’t blocked in. By the time I parked outside my parents’ condominium, it was getting a little purplish in the sky, but the heat hung on for dear life. It was a record spring for heat, the paper had said, and it caught everybody with his long underwear still on. The house wasn’t really a house, it was something called a unit. This unit looked like all the other units on what looked like a street, but it wasn’t a street, since all the units shared the same street address. It saved on numbers. I let myself in with my key. There were no lights upstairs and none on the main floor. She had been down in the recreation room watching television since the early afternoon. I walked over the high pile of the broadloom and went downstairs. She was where I expected to find her, where she had been since 1952 as close as I can remember.

“That you, Benny?” she asked without turning her head.

“Yes, Ma.”

“I thought it was you. Your father’s playing cards at the club tonight. This is his night to play cards.”

“Uh huh.”

“Did you eat?”

“I had a sandwich downtown about an hour ago.”

“Good, because there’s nothing to eat around here.”

“Uh huh.”

“That was too bad on the news, wasn’t it?”

“What?”

“Too bad.”

“Too bad about what, Ma?”

“About Chester Yates.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I just told you.” I went over to the set and looked for the button to turn it off. She protested, but I found it. I looked at her half expecting to see a decreasing circle of light end in a pinpoint of brightness and then go out, but she just sat there looking at the blank set.

“You shouldn’t do that, Benny.”

“You started to say something. I’m trying to help you finish it. Tell me and I’ll turn the set on again. Cross my heart.”

“Don’t get funny with your mother.”

“Ma, for God’s sake tell me what you saw on the news about Chester Yates.”

“He’s dead, that’s all. Now turn it back on again.”

“What do you mean he’s dead? I just saw him this afternoon.”

“Well, about an hour ago he put a bullet through his brain.”