I dropped my eyes from name to name, trying to imagine the hold Zekerman held over each of them. And each one, a possible murderer. When I’d scanned all the way to the bottom I was none the wiser. I now had double confirmation that Ward was a patient and I knew that he had been the subject of oblique questions aimed at Vern Harrington. I was happy with that. But I knew that a law court wouldn’t find one name any more attractive than the last. So, I was going to have to find out a little more about William Allen Ward. I think I already knew enough about him to make it a very interesting conversation.
That should have been a very satisfying thought. But my mind was somehow distracted from it. There was something in the list that had failed to register on my first look at it. I looked down the row on row of names once more. Then, about a third of the way down, hidden, innocent-looking, there it was:
Hilda Blake
the sister of the girl who’d been killed by the overdose of drugs back in 1964. The other girl in that photograph, maybe. Probably. So she was getting squeezed by Dr. Zekerman too. He had his needle into everybody. Bad enough losing a sister to a suicidal overdose, but now having to dish out hard-earned money to the greedy doctor. It didn’t seem fair. I hadn’t thought of her as being still in the area. I’d try to look her up as soon as I had both hands untied.
I turned out the desk lamp on Pete’s desk and let myself out. There was no switch to turn out the overhead fluorescent fixture. Probably needed an Act of Parliament.
TWENTY
Martha hadn’t got around to fixing the broken second step leading to her chipped green porch. I notice this with the satisfaction of a non-property owner. Maybe, when all of this was over, I thought, I’ll fix it for her. I wasn’t really a handyman, but I had generous impulses. She opened the screen door wearing a chenille housecoat and holding a glass of beer in her right hand. I went in, the screen door slapped back into place, and I followed Martha into her kitchen at the back of the house.
“Sit down, Cooperman. Take a load off your feet. Do you want the coffee I promised or would you prefer a cold beer?” I smiled.
“I get gas from beer. Thanks just the same.” I was brought up to believe that beer was the people’s drink and that I was cut above the people. A few years ago I went home for Friday night dinner at my parents after a few drafts in the Harding House with Ned Evans-Ned was trying to get me involved in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to be staged under the stars in Monte-cello Park. To hear my mother talk, you would have thought a brewery had come through the door. “A drunk and his family are soon parted,” my mother observed, while my father shook his head from side to side. To him, to them both, my taking a drink was only a final confirmation of the fears they had when they found me eating bacon with the O’Reillys when I was four.”
“I’ll have coffee, Martha.”
“It’s instant,” she challenged.
“There’s another kind?” I guess she saw me looking at her as she crossed to the counter, piled high with dirty dishes, to plug in the chromium kettle. She looked at me, then at her housecoat.
“Don’t get any ideas; I’ve got trousers on underneath. Say, while the kettle’s boiling, I’ll show you Liz Tilford’s room. I never cleaned it out when she left. Thought I might get my rent if I left things as they were. But I don’t think she’ll show her dimples around here again. She’s moved on to bigger game, if you ask me.” She led me to a small, bright room at the back of the house. Through the window came a clear view of a water-soaked lawn struggling to become green again. It had reached the dirty straw stage. There was a black maple silhouetted against the sky, with the cut of the railway line on the other side of a ragged wire fence.
In the room stood a bed-neat and businesslike-and a small table and chair. What pictures there were looked like they came out of a Sunday Supplement. The place had a barracks-like feel. On the bedside end of the table, held together by wooden bookends, stood half a dozen books in paper bindings. She’d been dipping into Plutarch’s Lives, the plays of Corneille, speeches of Cicero, a biography of Charlotte Corday, and Rousseau’s Social Contract, in English translation I was relieved to discover. What would a fellow like Bill Ward have seen in a serious girl like this? I couldn’t imagine Liz Tilford knocking back one-liners in front of the TV on hockey night.
Martha was standing behind me with a cup outstretched. I took it and shook my head at the books.
“Funny, eh?” she asked. “And she didn’t read magazines or the papers either. Don’t blame her there, really. There’s nothing in them these days. I told you she didn’t go out unless it was with Ward. And he didn’t call more than a couple of times a week. As far as I know, Liz didn’t write to anyone, or call anyone. She didn’t hear from anybody either. As a room-mate for me, she was next door to living alone. I always suspected that when Bill Ward took her out to eat in a restaurant, if he didn’t pay attention, he’d order for one.”
“But, Martha, you said she was a knock-out: long legs, red hair, a good body. She didn’t have to tell jokes or make with the clever chatter, all she had to do was be there.”
“Yeah. Some people have it rough,” she said with a sigh mixed with a mock come-hither look then disappeared back towards the kitchen. I glanced again at the books. None of them was old. They all looked as though they’d been picked up on the same expedition. She hadn’t written anything in any of them. When I gave one a hefty shake, a sales slip tumbled out. It told me that she had bought five of the books for sixteen dollars and fifty cents on March third of last year, at the Basic Bookstore, 986 Queen Street West in Toronto. I pocketed the slip and shook the other books too. Nothing. I went to the closet. Not very much here: a well-worn raincoat-time she bought a new one. A couple of pairs of summer shoes lay strewn about the floor of the closet like dead puppies, and a wool skirt hung from a hook on the back of the door. The pockets of both skirt and coat yielded nothing. I looked at the labels. Nothing distinctive, except a Toronto name on the skirt.
I was just turning away, disgusted with myself for not being able to pull Nero Wolfe out of one pocket and Phillip Marlowe out of the other, when my beady eye spied something in a dusty corner, half-hidden by a shoe. It was a laundry ticket with a South End address on it. Now I didn’t feel so empty-handed. I had two clues. With any luck, they might lead me into interesting dead ends.
I sipped at my neglected coffee and returned to Martha in the kitchen.
“Find anything useful?”
“Could be. Won’t know until later. I wonder if you’d mind my helping myself to these books for a few days? They might help me to get to know her better.”
“Help yourself. No skin off my shin if you don’t give them back.”
“I won’t forget to return them. Remember, you may never get that back rent. Tell me, Martha, is there anything else about her you haven’t already told me.”