“Hello?”
“Mrs. Yates, this is Benny Cooperman.” There was the sound of some sort of mental process down at her end of the wire.
“Oh yes, Mr. Cooperman.” Her voice became metallic and formal.
“I just wanted to tell you how sorry I was to hear about what happened to your husband.” I was trying to find a way to tell her what I’d found out without saying too much over the phone. “I wonder if we might meet to discuss some business-after Monday, of course.” That was the best I could manage.
“Mr. Cooperman, I don’t think we have any business to discuss. I thank you for what you’ve done, and I’m sure you understand that there is nothing further …” At this point another voice, on an extension somewhere, joined in with an authority familiar with the forms and arts of chilling a poor private investigator to the marrow.
“Look here, Mr. Cooperman, I don’t know what business you are talking about, but Mrs. Yates is in no condition to discuss business at a time like this. I’m sure you appreciate the severity of the shock she’s had and I don’t think that I want to see her suffer any more if I can help it. Do I make myself clear?”
“Bill, I …”
“Let me handle this, Myrna. I think that Mr. Cooper-man understands the situation.”
“My business,” I began to say, “is with Mrs. Yates, Mr.…?”
“This is William Allen Ward, Mr. Cooperman, and I think I’ve made it plain that Mrs. Yates doesn’t wish to be harassed by people just now. I don’t wish to sound unpleasant, but if you don’t get off the line, I will be forced to report this unfeeling and distress-causing behaviour. Do we understand each other?”
“Sure, Mr. Ward. Have it your way. But since when is a single phone call ‘harassment’? I’ll bet Mrs. Yates could tell me to hang up all by herself if she wanted to.”
“It seems to me I did just that, Mr. Cooperman,” she added, filling an inside straight that I’d left wide open to her.
“Okay, okay. I’m hanging up. Sorry to have caused all the commotion.”
So Myrna Yates had William Allen Ward running interference for her. I guess the mayor could spare him for a few hours in such a good cause. Ward was a comer in local politics, the mayor’s shadow, and the man responsible for adding the Harvard Business School phrases to the most recent crop of official documents. A local boy, he had brushed the hay and alfalfa off his jeans and made good in a way that looked like it was going to pull the whole city into the big time behind him. Even the mayor looked like a cracker-barrel hick when sitting next to Bill Ward on a public platform. I was impressed by Myrna
Yates’ taste in protectors. She couldn’t have picked better.
Next, I thought I’d try Martha Tracy. I dialled her home number. Bill Ward couldn’t be in two places at once. I was getting smart in my old age.
“M’yeah?”
“Martha Tracy?”
“That’s the name. Who wants her?” It was the husky voice of an original. I could picture her at her desk shooing away unlikely visitors from Chester Yates’ door.
“This is Benny Cooperman. I’m a private investigator.”
“Come off it, who is this?”
“No, really. I want to talk to you about something concerning Mr. Yates’ death. Can I come over to see you?”
“I got a house full of people here.”
“Tomorrow, then?”
“M’yeah. But not before noon. And it better be good. I’ve had my craw full of policemen the last few days. What was the name again?”
“Cooperman. Benny Cooperman. See you at noon, tomorrow.”
“Goodbye.” And she hung up. Martha Tracy was going to be someone I wouldn’t like to miss. She sounded as shaken by the death of her boss as the security man, less. Chester must have been a wonder to work for.
I locked up the office and started for the stairs. Frank Bushmill’s light was burning, so I wandered in. The Doc was sprawled in his waiting room, dead to the world. An empty bottle had rolled from where he’d dropped it across the worn carpet to the opposite side of the room. His mouth was open and he was blowing soft bubbles at the glass globe supported by three brass chains above his head. I found a coat on the chipped walnut rack and threw it across the body. He mumbled something unintelligible, which I agreed with, naturally, and then I left him there. He didn’t have patients on Saturday morning, so he wouldn’t be awakened by an emergency case of athlete’s foot at the crack of dawn.
Back at the hotel, it was the usual Friday night din. The beat from the band hammered at the floor like an electric vibrator. Somehow the melodic line was lost in transmission through the joists and plaster, just the amplified bass notes tickled my toes out of my socks like magic fingers in cheap motels. I climbed out of my clothes and into bed. I tried to sleep but got tangled in the loose ends of the bed sheets. I hate loose ends.
SIX
Saturday dawned a hot one. But these old brick walls kept the heat away from me until I hit the street around ten. After some coffee and toast at the United, I went back to the office. The Saturday crowd on St. Andrew Street must have been laid off. Three or four merchants stood at their doorways, wondering what had hit them. Somebody should tell them their former customers are out at the shopping plazas. Out there, the storeowners have customers knee-deep and wall to wall.
The sun cut a diamond-shaped patch through the transom, throwing the reversed letters of Frank Bushmill’s name across the stairs as I climbed to my floor. No mail on a Saturday. That meant less garbage. I tried reading an itch at the back of my knees. It seemed to say get in touch with Dr. Zekerman at home. He wasn’t listed in the phone book, so I turned to the city directory. No help there either. He must have a place out in the township someplace. I phoned Lou Gelner and he looked him up in the medical registry, complaining that he was doing all my work for me, which was true. He found that Zekerman lived out along the Eleven Mile Creek by Power Gorge. I thought that I might run out there after I went to see Martha Tracy.
The western part of the city is cut off from the rest of it by a canal to the north, dirty and full of nasty concoctions brewed in the papermills a few miles up the valley; and to the west by the river-sized stream called the Eleven Mile Creek. Except for the mansion of the chief mover and entrepreneur of the canal, built in the 1840s, this side of town has nothing to shout about. Most of the houses stand on small lots on narrow streets named after dead British colonial bigwigs. They are frame bungalows mostly with a few brick veneer specimens from time to time, and a sprinkling of pebble-dashed stucco. The coming of diesel did little to lift the grime of a century of coal-dust in the backyards along the right of way of the Hamilton-Buffalo line. Each of the houses presents either faded blinds or curtains to the outsider and all of them offer a generous veranda or porch to the inaccurate aim of the Beacon delivery boy.
Martha Tracy’s house backed on the tracks, but put up a brave front in the form of a well-cropped privet hedge along the walk. It was stucco, with black and white pebble dash, and had a green-painted wooden porch. The second step needed fixing. My knock rattled the screen door, so I tried to get at the inside door, but it was fastened with a hook. I rattled it again. Soon I could hear footsteps approaching. The doors opened and I was looking at a woman of fifty, stocky, blonde and with a Churchillian chin.
“You Cooperman?” she said. I nodded. She unhooked the door and invited me down the dim hall, past glimpses of an unmade bed through a doorway on my right to the bright kitchen. “I’ve got coffee, if you don’t mind instant,” she said and found two mugs inverted on the drainboard.
“I want you to know that I’m not from the police.”
“I’ve had a belly-full of them, I’ll tell you,” she said, raising her eyebrow significantly. “I don’t know how so many people can ask the same dumb questions so many times.” I hoped that my questions were better. Of course they were. I didn’t get them out of a book.