The Suicide Murders by Howard Engel

Author:Howard Engel [Engel, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Suspense
ISBN: 9780143179856
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1980-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

At three o’clock in the morning, Sergeant Savas and I started looking for coffee. St. Andrew Street was tight as a drum, and all of the usual places that either of us could think of were sensibly shut down and their operators in bed. Savas thought I was trying to be funny when I offered him a dried apricot. I always thought it would be a good idea to keep a bottle in the bottom drawer of my desk or in the filing cabinet, but with Frank Bushmill for a neighbour, and me for a tenant, it wasn’t necessary.

The Sergeant had arrived a few minutes after they’d carted Frank off to the hospital. In the movies and on television, a bump on the head is a temporary inconvenience. It doesn’t hold the hero up for long, and the rest of the cast bounce back just as quickly. Savas looked around my place, not taking things very seriously, since I hadn’t reported the loss of the Kohinoor diamond, or the Crown Jewels. He had the edges of the puzzle that was bugging me stuck in his teeth, like bits of his dinner, and he wanted me to tell him what was going on. He didn’t say that in so many words, but all those scowls couldn’t have been indigestion.

“C’mon,” he said, and I followed him out into a fine ran, that reflected the stoplights and street signs in a way that made me turn up my collar. The Sandman had already dumped a truckload of dirt in both my eyes, and every bone in my body cried out to be laid to rest. Instead, we got into the Sergeant’s car and I could hear the hiss of the tires on the wet road. I didn’t much care where he was going. I think I even closed my eyes for a minute, because when I felt the car stop, I could feel my mouth shouting for a toothbrush. It was cold and nearly dawn on a day I knew I would want to forget.

I couldn’t tell where we were, but Savas seemed to know what he was doing. He knocked on a door in a one-storey frame building that came a car-length from the edge of the sidewalk. The door was opened by a short fat man with the shortest arms I’d ever seen on a grown man.

“How are you, Lije?” he said without a great deal of warmth.

“Good morning, Chris. Come on in. You’re up early. I was just thinking of closing up. Nothing much doing.”

“This Lije Swift, Mr. Cooperman. Lije is short for Elijah. He’s a regular prophet, aren’t you, Lije. Mr. Cooperman here got himself burgled tonight while he was out burgling somebody else. You got any coffee hot?” He let us into a large dining room full of family-sized dining room tables, not the usual restaurant tables, and we both collapsed into Lije’s antique press-back chairs.

“Okay, Mr. Cooperman,” he said with his eyelids half closed, “what are you

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