The streets were wide with pools of light showing the way, while the houses themselves lay well back from the street under maples and birches. Hillcrest Avenue curved along the ridge of the same valley the canal took, but at a point beyond where it was a canal. On my right, the backyards of the rich ran for hundreds of feet down to the clay banks of the Eleven Mile Creek. Driving slowly I could see the house numbers easily, not that it was necessary: two police cruisers were stilled parked outside the Yates place, where all the lights were still burning.
I slid in behind one of the police cruisers, killed the motor and doused the lights. I was on my third cigarette, when a man came out of the house. He was a big guy, so I was surprised when he didn’t get into one of the cruisers. I took a good look at his meaty face as he went under the streetlamp. He walked past my car without interest and headed along the sidewalk to a dark Buick parked about a hundred yards behind me. After he drove off, I had another cigarette, and then I thought, “Enough of this driving around.”
The national news doled out its usual helping of international calamities and national absurdities, which I was able to watch in black and white from my bed. I’d closed the dusty curtains to keep the neon out, and lit a cigarette. I’d smoked nearly two packs today without once thinking of giving it up. It had been a busy day. From downstairs came the beat of the rock group playing in the “Ladies and Escorts” section of the downstairs beer parlour. I could feel it through the mattress.
The local anchor man wore a crest on his blazer with the station’s logo on it. He looked pretty silly before he started speaking, and then it was the content that looked silly. They seemed to use the same film-clip of the back end of an ambulance three times for three separate stories. The last one was about Chester Yates. According to this account, the body had been discovered in his office on the seventh floor of the Caddell Building about five-thirty on an early security check by Thomas Glassock, who worked for Niagara. Nobody heard the shot. Chester had returned to his office just before the office staff left for the day. His secretary, Martha Tracy, who was the last one to see him alive, said that her boss had not been his usual ebullient self lately. I’ll bet Martha Tracy said ebullient. Those TV newswriters are all reaching for a Pulitzer Prize. The gun that he used was his own target pistol, and the police were hoping to wind up their routine investigation swiftly. Chester was then praised for his many public-spirited acts by Mayor Rampham wearing his other expression, and by Alderman Vern Harrington, a close personal friend, and the owner of this face I’d seen under the streetlamp leaving the home of the dear departed. That’s all there was to it. Thank you and good night.
The sun was illuminating the dust particles in my stale air at eight o’clock next morning, when I rolled out of a dream in which I’d been chased through Montecello Park by Chester and his wife followed by a dozen or so Keystone cops. Blinking, I thought that reality couldn’t be worse than this. I got up, shaved, put on my rumpled pinstripe suit again and again promised myself to retire it as soon as I could afford to. Once more I knotted my tie so that it made doing up my fly unnecessary. I tried it a second time, but it didn’t help. I grabbed a cup of coffee at the United Cigar Store, and looked through the paper to see if there was any more information about Yates’ suicide. There wasn’t. The solid citizen stuff was pushed to the top, and then the sad loss, and then the scant details about taking his life under the pressure of business and overwork. Case closed.
I climbed the twenty-eight steps to my office, and let myself in. The mail on the floor was unimpressive: “Give our Total Service a try and Save Five Dollars.” I wrapped a blank piece of paper around ten of Mrs. Yates’ twenty-dollar bills and put them in an envelope which I addressed to her. On the back of one of my remaining cards, I wrote:
Dear Mrs. Yates,
I was sorry to hear today of your husband’s sudden death, and I extend to you my deepest sympathy at this difficult time. I am returning to you part of the retainer you left with me yesterday because I have concluded my investigation, discovering that your fears were groundless and that in fact your late husband had been seeing a doctor.
I looked at it. I didn’t like my cramped words, I didn’t like my childish scrawl. I didn’t like the possibility that someone other than Mrs. Yates would open the envelope. There are always helpful people around when there’s a funeral in the air. I tore up the note and put the money in my inside breast pocket. I’d have to see her in person. But I couldn’t decently accomplish that until after the cops and the mourners had thinned out a little. I shrugged to myself and decided to buy myself a haircut. It would set me up for the whole day, and with my hair, which had been running for cover above my collar and behind my ears since I was twenty, it wouldn’t cut too deeply into my business day.
It was business I was brooding about as I walked up St. Andrew towards the barbershop in the basement of the Murray Hotel. I thought of dropping in on my cousin Melvyn to see if he needed any title-searching done down at the registry office. He could usually be relied upon to throw me some crumbs if I chirped brightly. He was even known to have paid me a couple of times. I can’t complain. It leaves me busy and like polio it keeps me off the streets. I remember the little creep sticking his tongue out at me when he was still in his playpen. Now he’s graduated and practising, he has learned subtlety. For a while I was his chief good-works project and my mother loved him for it. Lately, although Ma hadn’t noticed, his big interest in life was cuff-links made from real Roman coins.
There was a chair waiting in the barbershop. Bill Hall was sweeping up from his last customer and placed the brown curls in a white garbage can, leaving the mottled tile floor with a dull sheen.
“How’ve you been, Ben?” he asked seriously.
“Can’t complain, Bill. Nothing much doing in my line.”
“Nor in mine,” he said, cocking his bald head and looking at me meaningfully in the mirror.
“Too bad about Chester Yates,” I said, playing my king’s pawn opening.
“Well, we all got to go,” he sighed shaking his head, and trying to line up my ears on a horizontal line.
“Paper said it was business worries. What kind of worries do you get with his kind of business?”
“Real estate, developing and contracting? It’s a hustle like everything else, I guess. Most of them are walking a thin line holding their breath most of the time. They make their backroom deals and the accountants and lawyers straighten it out and make it look up and up.”
“But, if that’s the name of the game, why should he suddenly blow his brains out?”
“I guess even hustlers can have enough,” he shrugged in the glass over the bottles of hair tonic which, in the ten years I’d been coming to Bill, he’d never used on me.
“Uh huh.”
“I used to know his wife Myrna. Years ago. She came from the west end same as me. Her father had a wrecking yard out Pelham Road. There were two of them on the way out to Power Gorge, and her father ran the one closest to town. She was a saucy little tramp in public school. She, you know, developed early for a girl, and she knew what it was all about when the rest of us thought balls were for basketball hoops. Of course, she’s changed a lot now. Settled. Money does that. Funny thing about money, Ben: it makes people different, inside. Outside, you can’t tell much. I had Lord Robinson, the newspaper tycoon, sitting right where you are one time, and he wasn’t any different from anybody else. I couldn’t find any trace of his organizing genius in his hair. Ginger-coloured it was, getting kind of sparse so he liked it combed across. But where was all that power for making money? He had dandruff, same as you.”