I’d been back in the office about ten minutes when the phone started ringing. I was trying to get a chopped egg stain out of one of my ties with lighter fluid, so it was a welcome change. I thought that maybe it might be my mother. Her son doesn’t get his name in the paper every day. It was Myrna Yates. She asked if I could come to see her around three o’clock for tea. Jolly good, I said.
The next call was from the office of the registrar. Did I know that there had been some recent complaints against the way I was conducting my business? Was I, further, aware that the registrar takes a dim view of licencees not behaving themselves? And finally, I should be warned at once that any further complaints against my professional behaviour and I would have to face the licence renewal committee. I asked her to let me have that in writing, and she squealed like I’d goosed her in a crowded elevator. Harassment on the phone was one thing, but harassment on paper was something else again.
There weren’t any police cruisers outside the Yates house this time. Poor Chester was old news. What was left of him was equally divided between Victoria Lawn, purgatory and probate. His wife looked as though she might be in a position to turn at least one of them to good account.
It was the sort of place that had been built for fifty thousand in the late thirties, and had changed hands enough times, been painted every five years, so now I was looking at two hundred thousand dollars worth of house. It stood solid and not altogether forbidding, rather like a cottage that kept growing, on a strip of property running from the street right down to the creek, two hundred feet away and fifty feet below. Two hundred thousand dollars worth of house, and the doorbell sounded no different than the one on my parents’ condominium. And on inspection, what was masquerading as ivy on the ivy-covered walls, looked to me suspiciously like Virginia creeper.
I was braced for the stony face of a butler, but the door was answered by the widow herself.
“Mr. Cooperman. I’m so glad you could come.” She was wearing a gray wool skirt and a blouse, both from Toronto or New York. The blouse was silk in a Paisley pattern, stretched tightly in all the right places. She led me, and I followed her trim ankles, into a hall where I got rid of my raincoat and hat on a chair that looked as though it had been made of thirty different kinds of wood. The floor was covered with mushroom-coloured broadloom, the kind you sink into just enough so you know it wasn’t bought on special at the edge of town. She led the way through a large living room with lamps and end tables bracketing sofas and loveseats. There were a few Chinese antiques, a marble-topped table, pale jade in a display cabinet, that sort of thing. After another couple of rooms, we were out on a screened-in porch, a step below the rest of the lay-out.
“I thought we’d have tea out here,” she said. “We get a nice breeze from the back.” I said that I thought that that would be dandy, and that the breeze was worth the trip by itself. Something like that. She looked older than when I’d seen her first last Thursday. Her eyes were puffier, and she’d patched up the bad spots on her face with an ointment that smelled like Miriam Epstein when my mother force me to take her to a Friday night dance at the Collegiate. On the whole, Myrna still looked better than Miriam. She had those good bones in her face which would outlast her sensitive skin. And she’d tried to cover the results with perfume.
She offered me one of a half-dozen white wicker chairs and took one opposite me. She smiled nervously and quickly took a cigarette from a silver box on the glass-topped coffee table between us. My mother has boxes like that. Only at her house she keeps stray pennies, elastics, safety pins and book matches in them.
“That was a terrible thing that happened yesterday, Mr. Cooperman. Dr. Zekerman, I mean. You were there, weren’t you? Terrible. Do you think it had any connection with what happened to Chester?” She leaned over the table as she lit her cigarette with the only table lighter I ever saw that worked, then settled back sensuously in her chair as she breathed out a plume of smoke.
Just then a maid in a peach dress and starched apron swung through the narrow doorway with a tray of tea things and placed it carefully on the table. I pretended I didn’t notice. The girl was Mary Slack, the kid sister of a friend who grew up to become a fireman. “Your husband had been seeing the doctor for about a year. I was talking to Dr. Zekerman just two hours before he died,” I said, letting the silence that followed say what had to be said about the fragile thread of life. “He wanted to see me about something yesterday. He was excited and frightened. On Saturday, he tried to burn me to death he was so frightened. It was the name of your husband that set him off. He also connected your husband’s death with your pal, Mr. Ward.”
“Mr. Ward isn’t my pal, Mr. Cooperman. He was my husband’s best friend.” I’d wanted to see if I could get a rise out of her on that point. I could. She covered her pique by pouring the tea. I generally take four lumps, but in circumstances like this I settled for two. She was able to make me feel that three lumps was a social gaffe un-tobe-forgiven, and that four would necessitate my removal from the house at once.
“Tell me about that, Mrs. Yates. I’d like to know more about your husband and Mr. Ward. Can you, for instance, think of any reason why Dr. Zekerman might think that Ward might have had something to do with Chester’s- I’m sorry-your husband’s death?”
“That’s crazy. I mean, it’s absurd to suggest such a thing. Chester and Bill grew up together. They went to the same schools, they spent summers at one another’s cottages. They travelled to Europe together in the summer of their senior year at university. They belonged to the same clubs, and, well, they are, or were, best friends.
Everything that expression implies, including trust, confidence and respect.”
“Business?”
“Yes. Up to a point. Recently Bill has been working with the city. He had had to get rid of most of his holdings. But, before that, he and Chester were as thick as … Well, they were very close in business as well as in private.”
“Tell me about William Allen Ward.”
“You make him sound so formal. I guess, from the outside, that might be how he appears. But to us, he was just Bill. He’s a fine man, Mr. Cooperman, he’s always had a brotherly interest in Chester, like an older brother should.”
“Was he in fact older?”
“Same age, really. But you know how in any group, there’s always one who takes the initiative, and one who tags along. That’s the way it was with them. Chester was always a little slow off the mark. Bill was married for nearly a year before Chester asked me to marry him.”
“Was Bill Ward part of that wild crowd you described to me at our first meeting, Mrs. Yates?”
“Yes, he was. But Bill was always different. He wasn’t a show-off like some of them. He had a deeper side, as though he knew more about life and its seriousness than the rest of us. Not that he was a sourpuss. I don’t mean that. He trained as a chemist, you know, yet he used to read novels, if you can believe it.” She smiled at me over her teacup. I was enjoying my tea. It was a real treat to drink it without having to dredge up the sodden teabag first.
“Tell me, Mrs. Yates, as honestly as you can, what was your reaction when I told you that Chester hadn’t been seeing another woman; that in fact he had been having therapy with Dr. Zekerman for a year.”
“Mr. Cooperman, I thought I knew Chester very well. When I think back on my suspicions in your office last Thursday, I know where they began. That’s clear to me. When you told me that he was seeing a psychiatrist, I knew that you must be mistaken. I’m still sure of that. I think I would know if my husband was in very delicate mental health.”