The Suicide Murders

THREE

For a full minute I just looked at my mother. Her face looked old and drained of colour under her blond curls. I sat down hard on one of the vinyl stools in front of my father’s other hobby, his bar, trying to get the fact through to the right terminal in my brain. I couldn’t believe that the guy who’d carried all that overweight and a three piece suit for ten blocks, leaving me huffing and puffing like the Big Bad Wolf behind him on the hottest day this spring, had suddenly become work for the undertaker. It didn’t make sense. Do people get up from their hour on the shrink’s couch and quietly plug themselves? It didn’t jell somehow. I looked around the room, hoping that something somewhere would have an answer. There was a bookcase full of all the books I’d ever bought, except for the dozen I had in my room at the hotel. There were some of my brother’s medical text book discards: Histology, Dermatology and all the other ologies which a chief of surgery can safely discard. But no answers. Right about then I would have settled for a couple of good questions. I wasn’t getting anywhere, and I had that itch at the back of my knees that said “move.” I have good ideas only at the back of my knees. So I moved. I flicked the switch and turned my mother on again. The colour came back to her face and she smiled at a familiar commercial.

Upstairs, in the living room, with a portrait in oils of my mother at forty, when she was a brunette, hanging above the fireplace, I sank into a tangerine chair on the tangerine rug looking at the tangerine chesterfield and the tangerine curtains and tried to think. I could call Mrs. Yates. Bad idea. She would be playing jacks with the cops until midnight. I had money to return to her, but that could wait. I had news for her, but I wasn’t sure whether news that her husband hadn’t been playing around with another woman would exactly light up the sky for her. I could drop by the widow’s house. I even wondered whether she was a widow yet. Maybe there was a three days’ grace period when she was just the bereaved and bereft. Then I remembered that I only had her phone number and that was unlisted. I’d have to go back to my office downtown to look her up in the city directory. There didn’t seem to be any more I could do just then, except make sure that I saw the 11:15 local news.

I let myself out. The moon shining through the windshield had a big bite out of it, and I rolled the window down as I drove through the razzle-dazzle of the fast food traps on both sides of the north end of Ontario Street. “Chazerai,” my father would say. But everybody to his poison. I turned left at the light when I got to the end of Ontario, and then joined the one way traffic along St. Andrew. There was lots of parking space where I needed it. I left the Olds in front of my office, a two-storey brick building, with a crowning cornice that jutted out two feet from the front, like all the other places that dated from the same bad year in domestic architecture. The streets were as bare as my bank account at the end of the month. I’d passed a couple looking at the pictures outside the Capitol Theatre. Except for them, everybody was safe and secure behind closed doors, or off in some shopping mall turning pay envelopes into down payments on appliances.

Frank Bushmill had either taken himself home or pulled himself the rest of the way into the bottle. His lights were out. Once, when I’d picked him up off the floor and poured him into a taxi, he half-opened his befuddled eyes from the backseat and said, “Benny, you’re a decent old skin and God bless you.” Maybe he was off with the gay crowd having a hell of a time. I hoped so, but doubted it. Around here, poor Frank was the gay crowd. No wonder he drank.

My place always looked spooky at night, with moving shadows and lights crawling over the walls and filing cabinets until I found the light switch. The fluorescent light stamped on the shadows. The office was a mess, with everything where it should be. I dragged out the city directory from under the telephone to look up Chester’s address. It was in the right neighbourhood all right. He lived up to every dollar he’d earned right to the end. To think of him lying dead, when I’d seen him healthier than me only a couple of hours ago, stubbed all reason. Well, now he can be the healthiest body in Victoria Lawn. And what about his wife? She was sitting pretty. There would be no divorce. No further business for me in her direction. She was going to come out of this smelling of cut flowers, and only I knew how close she came to blowing the whole deal. I tried her number. After three rings, it was answered by a voice deep enough to belong to a police sergeant. She was under a doctor’s care and not taking any calls, thank you. “Yeah. So what are you still hanging around for?” I wondered after I’d hung back the phone.

I’d come to a dead end. It was getting late and I’d earned my pay, so what was I worried about? If I had a private life, it was time to be getting on with it. Only I didn’t feel like going back to my hotel yet. If I were a drinking man, this is where I would open my filing cabinet and pull out a bottle of rye from behind the dead files. There was a dried-up orange back there and some dried apricots. The one was inedible and the other gave me gas. To hell with it.

I locked up the door with the frosted glass and squired myself to the car. There were two drunks talking in front of the beverage room of the Russell House. I looked in my glove compartment for matches. I sat behind the wheel, startled by the brightness of my tie as I lit a cigarette in the dark interior, and decided to take a run out past the Yates place. It couldn’t hurt. And I’d like to think Myrna Yates would do as much for me.

I drove along the curving length of the main drag, then turned down into the valley where one hundred and fifty years ago the ship canal that the town had grown around had been dug. Now it ran in a filthy black arc behind and below the stores on St. Andrew. The road followed the canal for a while, being choosy about picking a crossing point, then doubled back to climb up the opposite bank to the two-hundred-thousand-dollar homes of South Ridge. Beyond that, on top of the escarpment, I could see a line of lights from streets like Minton and Dover in the South End, just this side of Papertown. The illuminated green water tower stood out as usual above everything.

The streets were wide with pools of light showing the way, while the houses themselves lay well back from the street under maples and birches. Hillcrest Avenue curved along the ridge of the same valley the canal took, but at a point beyond where it was a canal. On my right, the backyards of the rich ran for hundreds of feet down to the clay banks of the Eleven Mile Creek. Driving slowly I could see the house numbers easily, not that it was necessary: two police cruisers were stilled parked outside the Yates place, where all the lights were still burning.

I slid in behind one of the police cruisers, killed the motor and doused the lights. I was on my third cigarette, when a man came out of the house. He was a big guy, so I was surprised when he didn’t get into one of the cruisers. I took a good look at his meaty face as he went under the streetlamp. He walked past my car without interest and headed along the sidewalk to a dark Buick parked about a hundred yards behind me. After he drove off, I had another cigarette, and then I thought, “Enough of this driving around.”

The national news doled out its usual helping of international calamities and national absurdities, which I was able to watch in black and white from my bed. I’d closed the dusty curtains to keep the neon out, and lit a cigarette. I’d smoked nearly two packs today without once thinking of giving it up. It had been a busy day. From downstairs came the beat of the rock group playing in the “Ladies and Escorts” section of the downstairs beer parlour. I could feel it through the mattress.

The local anchor man wore a crest on his blazer with the station’s logo on it. He looked pretty silly before he started speaking, and then it was the content that looked silly. They seemed to use the same film-clip of the back end of an ambulance three times for three separate stories. The last one was about Chester Yates. According to this account, the body had been discovered in his office on the seventh floor of the Caddell Building about five-thirty on an early security check by Thomas Glassock, who worked for Niagara. Nobody heard the shot. Chester had returned to his office just before the office staff left for the day. His secretary, Martha Tracy, who was the last one to see him alive, said that her boss had not been his usual ebullient self lately. I’ll bet Martha Tracy said ebullient. Those TV newswriters are all reaching for a Pulitzer Prize. The gun that he used was his own target pistol, and the police were hoping to wind up their routine investigation swiftly. Chester was then praised for his many public-spirited acts by Mayor Rampham wearing his other expression, and by Alderman Vern Harrington, a close personal friend, and the owner of this face I’d seen under the streetlamp leaving the home of the dear departed. That’s all there was to it. Thank you and good night.

The sun was illuminating the dust particles in my stale air at eight o’clock next morning, when I rolled out of a dream in which I’d been chased through Montecello Park by Chester and his wife followed by a dozen or so Keystone cops. Blinking, I thought that reality couldn’t be worse than this. I got up, shaved, put on my rumpled pinstripe suit again and again promised myself to retire it as soon as I could afford to. Once more I knotted my tie so that it made doing up my fly unnecessary. I tried it a second time, but it didn’t help. I grabbed a cup of coffee at the United Cigar Store, and looked through the paper to see if there was any more information about Yates’ suicide. There wasn’t. The solid citizen stuff was pushed to the top, and then the sad loss, and then the scant details about taking his life under the pressure of business and overwork. Case closed.

I climbed the twenty-eight steps to my office, and let myself in. The mail on the floor was unimpressive: “Give our Total Service a try and Save Five Dollars.” I wrapped a blank piece of paper around ten of Mrs. Yates’ twenty-dollar bills and put them in an envelope which I addressed to her. On the back of one of my remaining cards, I wrote:

Dear Mrs. Yates,

I was sorry to hear today of your husband’s sudden death, and I extend to you my deepest sympathy at this difficult time. I am returning to you part of the retainer you left with me yesterday because I have concluded my investigation, discovering that your fears were groundless and that in fact your late husband had been seeing a doctor.

I looked at it. I didn’t like my cramped words, I didn’t like my childish scrawl. I didn’t like the possibility that someone other than Mrs. Yates would open the envelope. There are always helpful people around when there’s a funeral in the air. I tore up the note and put the money in my inside breast pocket. I’d have to see her in person. But I couldn’t decently accomplish that until after the cops and the mourners had thinned out a little. I shrugged to myself and decided to buy myself a haircut. It would set me up for the whole day, and with my hair, which had been running for cover above my collar and behind my ears since I was twenty, it wouldn’t cut too deeply into my business day.

It was business I was brooding about as I walked up St. Andrew towards the barbershop in the basement of the Murray Hotel. I thought of dropping in on my cousin Melvyn to see if he needed any title-searching done down at the registry office. He could usually be relied upon to throw me some crumbs if I chirped brightly. He was even known to have paid me a couple of times. I can’t complain. It leaves me busy and like polio it keeps me off the streets. I remember the little creep sticking his tongue out at me when he was still in his playpen. Now he’s graduated and practising, he has learned subtlety. For a while I was his chief good-works project and my mother loved him for it. Lately, although Ma hadn’t noticed, his big interest in life was cuff-links made from real Roman coins.

There was a chair waiting in the barbershop. Bill Hall was sweeping up from his last customer and placed the brown curls in a white garbage can, leaving the mottled tile floor with a dull sheen.

“How’ve you been, Ben?” he asked seriously.

“Can’t complain, Bill. Nothing much doing in my line.”

“Nor in mine,” he said, cocking his bald head and looking at me meaningfully in the mirror.

“Too bad about Chester Yates,” I said, playing my king’s pawn opening.

“Well, we all got to go,” he sighed shaking his head, and trying to line up my ears on a horizontal line.

“Paper said it was business worries. What kind of worries do you get with his kind of business?”

“Real estate, developing and contracting? It’s a hustle like everything else, I guess. Most of them are walking a thin line holding their breath most of the time. They make their backroom deals and the accountants and lawyers straighten it out and make it look up and up.”

“But, if that’s the name of the game, why should he suddenly blow his brains out?”

“I guess even hustlers can have enough,” he shrugged in the glass over the bottles of hair tonic which, in the ten years I’d been coming to Bill, he’d never used on me.

“Uh huh.”

“I used to know his wife Myrna. Years ago. She came from the west end same as me. Her father had a wrecking yard out Pelham Road. There were two of them on the way out to Power Gorge, and her father ran the one closest to town. She was a saucy little tramp in public school. She, you know, developed early for a girl, and she knew what it was all about when the rest of us thought balls were for basketball hoops. Of course, she’s changed a lot now. Settled. Money does that. Funny thing about money, Ben: it makes people different, inside. Outside, you can’t tell much. I had Lord Robinson, the newspaper tycoon, sitting right where you are one time, and he wasn’t any different from anybody else. I couldn’t find any trace of his organizing genius in his hair. Ginger-coloured it was, getting kind of sparse so he liked it combed across. But where was all that power for making money? He had dandruff, same as you.”

The morning was well advanced by the time I left the hotel and started back to the office. The sidewalks showed a few storekeepers leaning against their plate-glass windows. Without thinking about it, I was staring into the window of the sporting-goods store at the baseball mitts and English Dinky toys. I could see the old man at the counter in an otherwise empty shop. An old-fashioned bell rang as I opened the door.

“Yes?” he said, looking over his glasses. “Say, aren’t you Manny Cooperman’s boy?” I nodded. “I thought so. I’ve known your father for forty years. He used to bring you in here when you were a boy. Which one are you? One of you is a doctor, isn’t that right?”

“I’m Ben, the one that stayed at home.”

“That’s right, I see you go by once in a while. You don’t come in any more. Say, I remember one time your father brought you in here, you couldn’t have been more than three or four, but walking you know, and I asked you-it must have been in the 1940s, just after the war started-and I asked you, just kidding, mind, who did you think was going to win the war over in Europe. And you thought a minute, I’ll never forget it, and said that you thought that both sides were going to lose. Now can you beat that? Do you remember saying that? Did your father ever tell you that story? I know it was you. You or your brother. Couldn’t have been more than five or six. Yes, sir, I’ll never forget that.”

He seemed to sink into his private past for a minute, looking very tall and thin in the tall, thin store with the light coming in through the bicycle wheels in the window.

“It was my brother.”

“Hmmm?” he asked, pretty far away.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Is there something special you are looking for, Ben? We don’t see you much these last few years. We seem to lose them after high school and then pick them up again when they start tennis and racketball. But there’s a ten-year gap sometimes. I didn’t catch. Did you say you were looking for something special?”

“Oh, I was vaguely looking at your bikes through the window-it’s Mr. MacLeish, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. You know my brother’s gone.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Well, that was a good many years ago now. It gets longer every time I add it up. You were asking about bicycles. Yes, a lot of people your age are riding safety bikes. You know I sell more to young adults than I do to teenagers. Isn’t that a pretty paradox for you? I guess it’s the gears they have today that they didn’t have in your day or in mine. And it’s all this play they give to fitness on the television. Don’t you think that’s so?”

I walked with Mr. MacLeish to his display of bicycles. He had about twenty on the floor and another bunch hanging from hooks on the wall. Behind a partition, a teenager in a mouse-coloured shopcoat was assembling more from wooden crates.

“Funny thing,” Mr. MacLeish said, his watery eyes winking over his lenses, “speaking about bikes. You know who came in through that door yesterday afternoon? It just goes to show you that you can’t be too careful on the subject of fitness. Well, sir, yesterday afternoon

I had a customer looking at bikes, and he was a dead man by the time I closed up for the night.”

“You mean Chester Yates?”

“Why how’d you know that? That’s right. Isn’t that a remarkable thing?”

“Well, I guess anybody can look at bikes even if he means to shoot himself in an hour.”

“Ben, I agree with you. It might calm a desperate man about to commit a desperate act. But Ben, looking at bikes is one thing, and buying them’s another.”

“What?”

“That’s what I say. Buying a ten-speed bike and then killing yourself, that’s a totally different can of paint.”