Getting Away With Murder

PENGUIN CANADA

GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER

HOWARD ENGEL
is the creator of the enduring and beloved detective Benny Cooperman, who, through his appearance in twelve best-selling novels, has become an internationally recognized fictional sleuth. Two of Engel’s novels have been adapted for TV movies, and his books have been translated into several languages. He is the winner of numerous awards, including the 2005 Writers’ Trust of Canada Matt Cohen Award, the 1990 Harbourfront Festival Prize for Canadian Literature and an Arthur Ellis Award for crime fiction. Howard Engel lives in Toronto.

Also in the Benny Cooperman series

The Suicide Murders

Murder on Location

Murder Sees the Light

The Ransom Game

A Victim Must Be Found

Dead and Buried

There Was An Old Woman

The Cooperman Variations

Memory Book

East of Suez

Also by Howard Engel

Murder in Montparnasse

Mr. Doyle & Dr. Bell

HOWARD ENGEL

A BENNY COOPERMAN MYSTERY

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1995

Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1996

Published in this edition, 2008

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright © Howard Engel, 1995

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in Canada.

ISBN-13: 978-0-14-316751-8

ISBN-10: 0-14-316751-0

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For my son Jacob Harry Engel

and his grandparents

Arthur and Doris Hamilton

and

Lolly and the late Jack Engel

Getting Away

with Murder

PROLOGUE

The trees were leafless, holding black fingers against the sky. Stubborn and sullen, the snow was receding from the front yards on Henrietta Street. The white wood siding of the old houses along the eastern side were bathed in late afternoon sunlight. It wasn’t a warm light; there was little warmth in it at all. Still, the tall man with white hair brought out a red metal box of tools and a mechanic’s castered board for working flat on his back. He placed the tools beside his ten-year-old Buick before returning to the garage. There was almost too much equipment for a little job like changing his winter oil. If he waited a week or two, the weather would be gentler. He wheeled out a hydraulic jack and proceeded to position it under the car. After hoisting it above the driveway, he stretched himself out on the creeper board and rolled himself beneath the car. From time to time an arm appeared to reach for a wrench or a greasy rag. The man was humming to himself so he didn’t hear the footsteps in the driveway.

The car looked as though it had been washed every other day since it left the showroom. There were no rusty patches on the fenders or doors where highway salt eats freely of cars in the Canadian winter. His tools looked well cared for. The jack, for instance, was in mint condition, the sort rarely seen away from a professional service garage. There was a handle, the up-and-down working of which raised the car incrementally above the driveway. There was also a valve, the turning of which lowered the car again so that its weight rested on its four regularly rotated tires.

The song that he was humming was an old army song, something off-colour, and only half-remembered. The tune changed pitch as he stretched to reach for an oily rag, which he pulled out of sight. The leg that was visible was mottled with marks of age. The flesh looked grey above a navy blue sock.

The footsteps stopped by the jack. The humming stopped.

“Who’s that?” the man under the car asked, seeing feet standing in the drive. That is all that was said. A hand turned the valve and the car settled. The weight of the Buick returned to the driveway. Footsteps retreated. There was no one nearby to hear the scream.

ONE

“Get up!”

There was a swimmer somewhere out in the lake. I could see a flashing line of rope playing out. It was a life-preserver thrown from a boat. I felt myself sinking. I was the swimmer. I was in trouble. The water was sucking me down.

“Come on, you bastard! Get up!”

“Show a leg, Cooperman!”

“Let me get him going, Phil. I know how to do it.”

My dream evaporated. The lake and the rope vanished just as I could begin to feel the tug of the line getting taut, shaking bright beads of water out of the rope. I was awake now, although my eyes were still closed. I felt a hand on my shoulder shaking me. I tried to locate where the various parts of me were lying: hand, head, feet, groin. I could feel hot, peppermint breath on my face.

“Get out of bed! You heard me, damn it!”

I struck out with all my strength, aiming at the smell and the heat of his face. I connected. I felt the pain in my wrist and fingers. At the same time, I opened my eyes. I’d knocked one of them to the foot of my bed. But there were two others. I knew it was all over then. Even as the man with the Lifesaver breath, the one called Phil, was rubbing his chin, I could feel the futility of resistance. I pulled my legs from under the covers and touched the carpet with my feet.

“Good!” said the man with his back to the door. “Now put your clothes on. You’re coming with us.”

The man I’d punched was still sitting on the end of my bed rubbing his chin. What did I expect? I’d only hit him a moment ago, yet it felt like three or four minutes since I first felt his hand on my shoulder. Where was the lifesaver with the rope attached? Was I translating his breath into my dream? I’d have to figure that out one day when I grew to be a very old private investigator watching my grandchildren scamper in front of the fireplace.

I reached for my pants on the chair where I’d left them the night before. They seemed to belong to another age: “before.” This was “after.” How carelessly I’d left my clothes heaped in the order I’d taken them off. With my audience of three looking on, my clothes looked like artifacts in a museum, like the flints and baskets and stone axes in the diorama of Neanderthal life in Toronto’s big museum. I got dressed, trying the while to get my mind off the irrelevant. But the only things I could think of were the irrelevant. I’d been expecting the tired old Late-Late Show of my life spinning back before my eyes, but all I could think of was dirty underwear and overdue library books. Obviously, I had to try harder.

First, there was the dream. Something about a struggling swimmer. What had that to do with anything? Not much. I’d been quietly canoeing up at Dittrick Lake. Then it had gone sour as I was shaken back to consciousness. I could let that go. It was a beginning.

I tried to go over in my mind who I had crossed lately. I wasn’t working on a big case, just a couple of small-claims cases and a trail of credit-card flimsies that were leading me farther and farther away from ever seeing any more business from where my client was living. I couldn’t see my friend Mendlesham resorting to violence over the fee I was trying to collect from his law firm. Mendlesham was the least violent of lawyers, and my claim on his books from last year wasn’t the biggest headache in his medicine cabinet. I couldn’t see any heavy muscle coming from any other direction either. I tried to reopen in my mind a few old cases with loose ends hanging out of the files. I still couldn’t come up with anything that would get a trio of hoodlums out of bed before dawn and loid the two locks that should have protected me from the likes of them.

I walked into the bathroom. Two of the hoods didn’t move; Phil, the one on the bed, glanced over at the others. “Leave it open,” said the man with his back against the door to the apartment. He was the boss of the three. Older, calmer, he exerted authority. He’d read my mind as I thought of closing the bathroom door. I left it open. The candour between us was perfect, if a little one-sided.

How do you escape into a tube of toothpaste? That’s what I wanted to know as I examined my face in the mirror. Seeing nothing better to do, I brushed my teeth. When I reached for my razor, a voice in the doorway said: “Leave it!” I turned on the tap and gave my face a rub with a cold, wet washcloth.

There was a fire escape just outside the large bathroom window. If it had been summer, the window might have been open to let in the hope of a breeze, but this was March, the weather outside clinging to February. I knew that the window was jammed with paper and locked. The face of Phil, with a red mark on his chin, appeared in the mirror. “You can quit stalling. We gotta get this show on the road!”

I was rushed down the stairs, herded by the flanks of my keepers to a car that was puffing a warm exhaust trail up into the frosty air. The man behind the wheel didn’t bother to look at us as I was thrust into the back seat between two of the men, while the head man climbed in front with the driver.