Getting Away With Murder (20 page)

“Are you in charge of the case?”

“Until I hear I ain’t, I am. You think we should have a little talk?”

“I was just going to suggest it. Pete, does this mean we’re in the middle of a gang war?”

“If you’re lumping in the Shaw murder, you could have a point. Shaw’s not too clean when you take a close look. This we don’t need, Benny. Remember when that guy got it in the tower overlooking Niagara Falls? That was a real bloodbath. Emptied a lot of files around here. But this time, I don’t know. We got the smoking gun, but there are no prints on it.”

“When do you want to see me?”

“Gimme an hour, hour and a half, to go through some stuff. Then you better come up here to the house. You been here, right, so you can find your way. See you, Benny.” He hung up and I held onto the stinging receiver for another ten seconds or so before I put it down. Damn it! I thought, what next?

I made a single wrong turn on my way to the Wise house, but it was enough to make me later than I’d intended. There were three cop cars parked in front and Pete’s own car around back. Inside, Victoria took my coat, just like old times. Her eyes were red. She looked like she’d been through a Cuisinart, the way her hair was all over the place. I saw uniforms and lab-coated forensic people going about their business. Pete stood by the big partners desk surrounded by yellow plastic tape inviting me to stay clear of the Crime Scene. Pete was talking to Mickey and one of the uniforms. He gave me a short grin of recognition when he saw me standing beyond the tape. After a few minutes he climbed over the plastic and came towards me, passed me and went on, past a view of a big, well-equipped kitchen, to a large TV room I hadn’t seen before. It too was a show-off location for little brown clay figures, paintings and wall-hangings. Victoria was there with Phil and Sidney. Syl had been taken downtown, I was told later, for questioning about an unrelated matter. Victoria slipped me a smile, but there was worry written in her brown eyes.

“You know everybody?” Pete asked, waving his hand in the direction of those sitting down and not excluding Mickey and the uniform who had followed us into the room. “Remember Corporal Kyle, Benny? He ran you in once on a B and E.”

“Thanks for the memory, Sergeant,” I said through my teeth. “Hello, Corporal. Good to see you.”

Pete asked a few questions of each of the people in the room and then fired some at me. They had to do with times and dates. He was still trying to get the background, who was where, and who could observe whom and when. I found out that Wise slept in a room above the familiar office and that Mickey and Victoria shared a room on the third floor at the back. There were several spare rooms reserved for special guests as well as rooms for both Hart and Julie on the second floor. It was early days in the investigation. Just the same, Pete looked like he had been up all night.

“Let’s get out of here for a few minutes,” Pete said to me after about twenty minutes of this. “I’m out of cigarettes.”

“Great! That’s one thing the suburbs do well. Hundreds of places wherever you look.” He took another three minutes whispering to Kyle in the kitchen before we finally headed out the door.

“Okay, we’ll take my car.” We got in and even after driving around for ten minutes, we hadn’t seen anything that looked like it might sell tobacco. After another five minutes of turning and twisting, Staziak spotted a 7 Eleven store not far from the Forks Road.

“Abe Wise died before his work was finished,” I said, as Pete fumbled with the car door.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, there’s a lot of room for improvement in the location of tobacco outlets around here. Wasn’t tobacco one of his rackets?”

“See what you mean. I don’t think it was a major interest of his for at least a year. I’ll be right back.” I watched him move away from the car and into the store with its bright red-and-blue plastic soft-drink signs outside. The trees brushed naked branches against the dusty galvanized roof. A girl coming out of the store with a silvery bag of potato chips pulled up her collar as she walked to a car stuffed with kids.

When Pete Staziak got back and had lighted his first smoke in a long while—by the look of him—I knew that he was ready with questions for me. I filled him in on how I had won the opportunity to work for Abram Wise in the first place and then told him how I’d seen him last on Friday. He was interested in my telling him the reason why I was hired and I told Pete I’d send a free sample of my report writing to his office.

“Well?” he asked when I wound down.

“Well, what?”

“What direction does your report point?”

“Read it yourself, Pete. I can’t see any illumination in it. In fact, a lot of it is padding, just to fill up some paper. If you’re asking if I know who killed Wise, I don’t. I don’t have any idea. It could have come from a number of directions. My favourite theory is one that has both Wise and your Ed Neustadt murdered by the same person.”

“What! Come on, Benny! What are you talking about? Neustadt was not much more popular than Wise in official circles, but give me a break!”

“You’re asking and I’m telling, Pete. That’s the way I see it. If you’re talking proof here, I’m not your man.”

“Benny, Abram Wise was one of the kingpins of organized crime. You can compare him to Tony Pritchett of the English mob and not get much change back.”

“Yeah, I guess so. And since it’s a crook lying on the carpet—”

“I told you, he’s been taken to get our
post mortem
blue-plate special. Only the best.”

“—you aren’t too concerned about who iced him. Right?”

“That’s as cynical a statement as I’ve ever heard, Benny.”

“It was a question. If you think the killer is also a crook, don’t you think you’ve got your work cut out for you?”

“We treat all serious crimes seriously, Benny. We’ll give it our best shot just as we always do.” I’m not one hundred per cent sure why I sniped at Pete in that way. Maybe I hoped it would get him to share his findings with me, just to show that the boys in blue were on the job.

“One thing I forgot to tell you: the Registrar at the OPP has been after me in answer to some complaints that have been laid at my doorstep since Wise grabbed me from a warm bed.”

“So what? We all have problems. And I’m trying to run a murder investigation. Two murder investigations, damn it!”

“See if you can find out who sicced the OPP on me. It might lead into your investigation. Might not. Just an idea.”

“A rare commodity in a case like this, Benny.”

“Remember, somebody took a shot at me on Wednesday. He could have been practising, Pete.”

Staziak had been driving north along the newest part of the Welland Canal. The prospect was grey. Nothing was moving except for a few canvasback ducks rising from the still moving channel. The shipping season had opened officially, but there was no visible sign of it. Everybody was waiting for the hold of winter to snap.

“A very rare commodity,” Pete repeated, forgetting that at least a minute had gone by. “I better get back to the house, my friend.” So saying, he moved his Toyota back in the direction of the home of the late Abram Wise.

Back inside Wise’s TV room, now empty of the household staff, I learned from one of the uniforms that Sylvester Ryan was involved in some outstanding warrants related to smuggling and hijacking. He was in town being questioned, while Sergeant Staziak picked up the threads of his murder investigation. Once I came into the house with Pete, I was allowed to cross the plastic barrier into the murder room. As far as I could see, there was no secondary crime suggested by the evidence. No drawers were open, no sign of looting. The windows were shut. Just as you find in a mob hit, the gun was left on the scene.

“Where were Wise’s stooges when the shooting started?” I asked Pete, who had shoved his hat high up on his head instead of removing it altogether.

“According to Victoria, everybody was eating breakfast in the house next door when she found him lying on the floor behind his desk. Right here,” he added in case I couldn’t see the blood or the traces of a chalk line.

“Nobody heard a shot?”

“No-body!”

“Who saw him last?”

“Julie, Wise’s daughter, who looks like she might be in a lot of trouble. The only thing saving her right now is the fact that Victoria only ‘thinks’ the front and back doors were locked. They were ‘usually’ locked but she can’t swear they were this morning. There had been a heavy run of traffic in and out of the big room. Mickey says he was still breathing at eight-thirty this morning. That’s what Mrs. Long, the daughter, Julie, says too, but she has a highly peculiar sense of time among other things. So, say it’s eight-thirty this morning. That’ll probably be closer than we can get from the body in the fridge downtown, Benny. He was alive at eight-thirty, he was dead at nine-fifteen, nine-thirty. She, this Victoria, isn’t too clear about the time she found him, She called us on that phone and hers were the only prints we’ve got so far.”

“What about noise? A shot in here must have made a commotion.”

“If I fired off a piece in here, would it normally be heard next door? We tried it just before you got here. You can still smell cordite. Yes, an ordinary gun can be heard above the din of corn flakes, Rice Krispies and frying leftover pizza. Next question?”

“Did you find the silencer? If he wasn’t killed with a sound-muted weapon, he’s still walking around.”

“We’ve done one search and will do another in a few minutes. You still connect this to Ed Neustadt?”

“I don’t know. Both deaths are bizarre and one at least is premeditated. Did Mickey recognize the gun?”

“It was Wise’s, usually in the top right-hand drawer of his desk. He had a permit to keep it. Like everything else around here, it’s an antique.”

“Which doesn’t usually come with a silencer, right? Thing like that could have been flushed or popped down a drain.”

“In the movies, Benny. In the movies. In real life, a silencer is not something you can slip into your pocket. The silencers I’ve seen have all been handmade. Fancy tool or gun-making equipment. Works like the muffler on your car.”

“Not my car, or the shot would have been heard.”

“We’re looking for a cylinder about eighteen inches long and about two and a half inches in diameter. Seen anything like that?” He gave me a grim smile that told me that this was among the more trivial problems he had to deal with. “Just the kind of mess the boys love most. At least we won’t have to dig up the whole backyard.”

“Why?”

“Christ, Benny, leave us some joy!”

TWENTY-TWO

I took the rest of the weekend off. I read a couple of books, mysteries, some old ones by McStu that I’d read before, but which hadn’t even a nodding acquaintance with real people, not the ones I know, anyway.
Haste to the Gallows
, his book on the Tatarski case, lay where I put it. I didn’t want to revisit it at this time. What I needed was a complete rest. I’d called my mother, invited myself to dinner, but Ma said that she and Pa were going out. I don’t know where they were going; she didn’t say. She wouldn’t have just given me an excuse.

I did my laundry if you really want to know about it. I carried it to the place on King Street run by Billy Watson’s sister. Instead of leaving it in her care, I ran it all through the works myself. Why not? Did I have anything better to do?

The chicken soup at the Di was good, but it wasn’t like Ma’s. The chopped-egg sandwiches were a little off their best and the milk was warm. But even while I was noting these sensations, I knew that it was me and not the food. The Di was as dependable as the steady one-way traffic moving along St. Andrew Street from west to east. Much as I would like to, I couldn’t blame my mood on the Di.

Sunday was worse. I took a long drive in the country to see if I could shake off the depression. I did this after finding out how all of my friends were leading complete and busy lives that would brook no unscheduled visits. I took a ramble on the deserted golf course at Niagara-onthe-Lake, where a cold wind off the lake raked through my coat even in the lee of the old fort, with the familiar skin disease mottling its brick. I used to know the word for that. Another failure. Another thing to kick myself for. I ate at a seafood restaurant. The place was chilly. The fillet I ordered still retained the shape of the box it had been quick frozen in some months or years ago.

Then, first thing on Monday morning, as soon as I unlocked the office, it happened. Dave Rogers, may the gods be good to him, phoned and asked me to stay on the case.

“What?”

“You heard me! I want you to stick with it. You hear me, Cooperman?”

“I hear you, Dave, but I can’t be hearing you right. The cops are still investigating Abe’s death. They may not have arrested anybody but give them time. It’s early days,” I said, borrowing Pete Staziak’s phrase.

“I know all that. But six months from now, they still won’t have a clue about who killed Abe Wise. I know the cops in this town: they’re good and they’re honest and they’re too damned busy to spend much time on Abe.”

“I think you’re wrong.”

“Well, that’s your problem. My problem is that the kid I used to play hookey from school with has been killed. I can’t just sit here with my arms folded. I gotta do something. So, you’re it, Benny! Go get ’em!”

“You must have walked into an I-beam, Dave. This is crazy talk.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Anyway, it’s none of your business. Are you so well fixed you don’t need the business? I’ll call that Howard Dover guy. He gives value. Look, Benny, I was on the phone half the night talking to Paulette. You remember Paulette.”

“Sure. His first wife.”

“Well, we both think that I gotta do what I can or I won’t be able to live with myself. It’s something I gotta do, you understand what I’m saying?”

“You’re trying to buy peace of mind, Dave. I’m not selling that. I’m out of stock. Why don’t you see a good doctor?”

“Don’t give me that bullshit! I want you! I’ll drop by some money later on this morning. I got a transport to load and my boy’s off sick with the flu. You’ll take a cheque, Benny?”