Howard Engel
Getting Away With Murder
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.
The local radio station was sending unwanted bright chat into the early dawn. There was steam on the windows from the driver’s breath. He turned on the wipers, which arced across the windshield, doing, of course, no good at all. This was the kind of person I was dealing with. I waved goodbye to sweet reason and settled back into the seat to take stock.
I was still breathing. That was in my favour. If they had wanted to kill me, they could have done it in my room where I might not have been discovered until the neighbours started complaining. They could be in Las Vegas by the time the cops opened a file on me.
Then I thought of Anna. She could have found me. I was glad that these hoods were saving me that at least. Even freshly slaughtered, I didn’t want Anna to first-foot it into my late presence. Anna was the person I most hated leaving behind. She-
I had to cut myself off. This was no time to become sentimental. If I was being taken for an old-fashioned ride, I had to keep my head clear. Thoughts of Anna might keep me from hitting upon what had to be done. “Cooperman,” I said to myself, “get me out of here!” As though my inner life had been betrayed by the outer. As though part of me was lugging the rest of my anatomy to the nearest ditch.
“Turn that radio off,” said the man beside the driver.
“What? That’s Dusty Rhodes.”
“You heard me! Turn the damned thing off!”
“Okay, Mickey, okay!” The sound disappeared. There was no comment from the back seat.
Mickey was the tallest of the trio, wearing a well-cut brown leather coat over a white Irish sweater. In his fur hat, he almost looked like a Horseman on leave from his Regina training ground. Under the hat I could see neatly shaved greying sideburns and the attentions of an earlymorning razor. He had all the high seriousness of a heavy without a suggestion that he split all of his infinitives.
The driver wore a black leather cap. There were acne scars on the back of his neck. He was wearing a dark green parka. The man to my right was Phil, the one with the sore jaw and peppermint breath. He was stocky, with short arms and legs. Would have made a good fur-trade paddler two hundred years ago. No room for excess legs in the canoes of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Anna had told me that. Always running back to Anna. Get back to your man. It had been a lucky punch. I had to admit that. But it had been launched with my eyes closed. The other senses had come into their own. I’d been lucky that a bedsheet or blanket hadn’t impeded my aim. I turned my head; he didn’t seem to be in lasting pain.
“Sorry I hit you,” I said, trying out a gambit without being too clear where it might lead.
“Shut up!” said the man on the other side, punctuating his words with his elbow in my ribs. “We got a long drive ahead of us. The less noise in the car, the better.”
“Where are we headed?” I asked with feigned innocence. Sharp pains hit ribs on both sides at the same moment. Nobody said anything. I settled on noting the year and make of the car. It was something to do. It wouldn’t have much post mortem value, but it showed me that I was being professional right up to the end.