I had just dug out my shoebox full of receipts and papers from the bottom drawer of my stack of filing cases with a view to doing my income tax, when the phone rang. It was Martha Tracy.
“Cooperman? This is Martha Tracy.”
“I know. I never forget a voice. Faces, maybe.”
“I saw you at the funeral.”
“Thought I’d see if you found that hat. The tall, sandy-haired jasper with the widow: was that Ward?”
“The one and only. The little guy on the other side was the mayor.”
“Stop the press! What’s on your mind?”
“They asked me to come in this morning, to clear up the junk in Mrs. Yates’ office. I’ve been knee-deep in cartons all day. Well, I ran across something peculiar. You’re the expert in peculiar, I figured, so I thought I’d let you in on it. It’s a list of appointments. I’ve never seen it before and I don’t know any of the people on it. The craziest thing is that the appointments are for just about every hour of the day. Some in the middle of the night. Are you still there, Cooperman?”
“Both ears.”
“Isn’t that cotton-pickin’ weird? Meetings at three and four in the morning, and names like Jones and Peters and Williams.” She sounded excited and was talking a little louder than absolutely necessary. “I put it in an envelope and mailed it to you. I got your address out of the Yellow Pages.”
“Martha, did you tell anybody about what you’ve found?”
“Of course not. Think I never watch television? You should get it in the mail tomorrow.”
“Depending on the mood down at the post office.”
“M’yeah, you’re right. Anyway …”
“Anyway, I want to thank you for keeping your eyes open. You’re a big help. I’m getting close to something. Or something’s getting closer to me.”
NINE
I’d been playing around with the receipts from my three oil company credit cards, wondering where all that oil had taken me and how much of it was for business and how much for pleasure. There was a trip to the Hamilton registry office to check the ownership in 1938 of a house on Barton Street, which in 1938 turned out to be a peach orchard. Meanwhile my client and his problem disappeared. There was the trip to Buffalo about that custom Porsche which a client’s son had bought for two hundred dollars. My client, smelling dead fish, sent me to trace the ownership. In a rented room in Buffalo’s tenderloin, I found the former owner. His estranged wife had done just what he’d asked-sold his car and mailed him the proceeds. I couldn’t find much pleasure written on the flimsy receipts. Funny how I get paid good money to fix other people’s lives, but mine always looks like a garbage bag the cats have opened up. I’ve got a thing about tidying things up. I should make an appointment to see myself professionally one of these days.
I was beginning to think that in another hour or so I would have broken the back of my income tax, when the telephone rang.
“Hello, Mr. Cooperman? This is Andrew Zekerman.” You could have knocked me over with a burnt matchstick. His voice was a little hesitant, but he sounded as though he had something important on his mind.
“So, Doctor, you’ve decided I’m not trying to murder you after all?”
“I can explain about that, Mr. Cooperman, and I certainly want to apologize for my unwarranted attack on you.”
“Well, the occasional attack, you know, keeps me on my toes.” I was feeling a little light-headed, and held the phone away from my ear to avoid possible singeing. “How well did you know Chester Yates?”
“He was my patient.”
“For how long?”
“Since last spring. About a year. His death, Mr. Cooperman, has upset me terribly.”
“Never lost a patient before, Doctor?”
“I was with him an hour before he died. That hit me very close. I was fond of Chester.”
“He didn’t leave your place in a suicidal depression, then?”
“Of course not.”
“I didn’t think so either. You think that somebody got to him, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do. I know it. And you’ve got to get to Bill Ward and tell him.”
“Right. We can’t have the first families knocking one another off, can we?”
“You don’t understand, Mr. Cooperman, this is too difficult to deal with over the phone, and I have a patient due. Could you come to see me here at six o’clock? I’ll explain everything to you. Is that satisfactory?”
“It’ll have to be. See you at six.” We hung up. I looked at my watch. His four o’clock patient was just ringing the buzzer.
I was too excited by this recent turn of events to play with my income tax returns any more. I had two hours to kill and I was too het up to sit on my butt waiting for the hands to pull themselves past all those numbers on the dial. I wandered out into the sun, crossed St. Andrew and gasped at the jungle-mouth smell coming through the doorway of the Men’s Beverage Room in the Russell House. It was like a taste of midsummer, and I could see the ghost of old Joe Higgins selling balloons and balsa birds on sticks as he propped himself in the lee of the stoplight on his crutches. Poor old Joe.
At the library, I went through the turnstile, and found a book on Chester’s specialty, real estate. I sat down at a wide, cool table, in a quiet corner, where the fountain wouldn’t make premature suggestions to my bladder. A man with a threadbare jacket was sitting opposite me reading the Reader’s Digest. The air conditioning touched him first then moved on to me. He smelt like he’d been sleeping in old tunafish. Still, he could read upside down, which was more than I could manage.
Once I started, I soon learned how much there was to the field and how little of it I had ploughed. Mortgages to me were the things moustachioed villains brandished in front of the tear-filled eyes of the widow and her beautiful daughter. I read on, keeping half an eye on my watch.
I left myself ten minutes to walk the few blocks along Church Street to Ontario and the Physicians’ and Surgeons’ Building. The way was lined by leafless maples, the odd catalpa tree and next to the Presbyterian church, a ginkgo, the one with fan-shaped leaves in summer.
Inside Zekerman’s lobby, I still had a minute or so in hand. I used it to study the botanic structure of the plastic yucca plant which loomed over the vinyl and chrome chairs and parquet floor. The plastic yucca comes apart in your hands if you examine it too closely. The bits that come away are harder to reassemble than you would first think. There is always ample foliage from the larger lower branches to hide the remains of such an investigation. At six o’clock precisely, I rang the doctor’s buzzer. I waited. I rang again. There was no response. I lit a cigarette, deciding that I’d caught him in the john, and gave the buzzer a good long press in another two minutes. No luck. I walked calmly to the telephone booth, dialled, let it ring and got my dime back after fifteen rings. I could feel a tenseness, born of too many movies, taking hold of the muscles in the back of my neck, as I looked for the number of the building’s superintendent. It was at the bottom of all those columns of doctors. One-oh-one. I found the apartment, and as I was waiting for the door to be answered, I imagined it opening on a dark room illuminated only by the light of a television set and with a beefy man with a can of beer in his hand sitting in an overstuffed chair in front of it. Odd how reality always trips up the imagination. He was drinking his beer from a dark brown bottle. I told him what the problem was and he heaved a heavy sigh and reached for a ring of keys. He left the television running: no sense depriving the furniture of what he had to miss.
The tenth floor was cool. Ozite carpeting ran the length of the wide corridor. We tried ringing again when we got to the right door, but Zekerman wasn’t answering. The super frowned for a minute at the bunch of keys, selected one and opened the door. The lights were on. But no television. It was more an apartment than an office. There was a small kitchen and a bedroom off one large room which was dominated by two large leather chairs, the sort that tilt back, slipping a footrest under your feet when you get back far enough. There was a small desk in one corner. Large french windows let what was left of the spring day into the room. Beyond was a cement balustraded balcony. I didn’t get to admire the view, because of the mess the apartment was in. There were papers flung in every direction. Beside the desk the file drawers were open, and red filing folders stood half down from their moorings. In the midst of this mess, the first, not the last thing we noticed as we came into the room was Zekerman lying stretched out on one of the leather chairs. There was blood around the top part of what used to be his head. His mouth gaped open adding to the look of surprise frozen on his staring frightened eyes. On the floor, behind the chair, more blood had dripped. In the middle of it lay a heavy African sculpture, similar to several other wooden sculptures which were about the only conscious attempt to decorate the room. I stepped on something. It looked like a piece of shell-like pasta. It was a piece of shell-like shell, a cowrie shell; the murder weapon had a ring of them around its neck, and a number of them were scattered over the carpet near the body. The super stood with his mouth open in the doorway. The shock had made him automatically suck in his belly so that it no longer rested on his belt.