by Howard Engel
In short, I was bored out of my mind. Until a knock at the door bade me put The Papers of Tony Veitch face down on my desk. I covered the novel with some papers of my own and walked to the door to open it.
Here stood, how can I describe her? A vision of loveliness? The woman of my dreams? All the clichés rolled into this particular five-foot-six package of earthly delights. The sort of woman you hope will walk into your office one day. For a moment I felt like Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer combined. I took in her perfume, the cut of her suit, the silky legs, her dark hair and was just getting ready to go around again when I suddenly recognized her.
“Stella! My God! Stella Seco! I don’t believe it!” I was taken up short by this. The vision had become flesh. It wasn’t intimately familiar flesh, I hasten to add, but at least it was grounded to a terminal in my past. She was no longer an agreeable abstraction. It was as though the slinky model in a fashion photograph turned out to be the girl next door. Only Stella was never the girl next door.
“Hello, Benny,” she said in that voice that melted steel. “It’s been too long. How have you been?”
I didn’t answer for a minute, I just kept looking. At last I cleared my throat and found some inadequate words. “You look terrific, Stella. Come in.” She walked around me when I failed to clear the doorway.
Stella and I had been at Grantham Collegiate Institute and Vocational School together. Forget the fifteen hundred other teenagers. She was my first great love. She was the first great love of every male in the school. None of us, as far as I know, ever scored with Stella. There was a protective family watching over every step she took in her nickel loafers. Not that there was a scarcity of Stella-watchers. Truth to tell, Stella provided a lot of us with not only a richly imagined sex life, but with our chief incentive to stay in school. Where the challenge of French irregular verbs and the binomial theorem failed to ignite our attention, where the three results of the Persian Wars and the Keystone Clause in the American Constitution failed us, there was Stella walking down the aisle to take her seat. There are bankers and doctors today in this city who would have been clerks and technicians had it not been for Stella Seco’s cool gaze and liquid walk.
Of course, the girls in the school hated her, as I discovered later on. They were as envious of her looks as the rest of us were of her good marks in everything from algebra to zoology. Girlfriends understood that their pinned dates’ eternal devotion was subject to the possibility that Stella might nod in their direction. Stella was magic. Stella lit up the sky.
I remember one story of her sitting with some girlfriends in the Rec Hut, the coffee shop across from the school, when she saw a football player crossing the street. She asked who he was and then announced that he was going to take her to the next big school dance. And he did! It was typical of Stella’s sense of herself and her power, which the senior girls ascribed to the neardrunken state certain adipose tissue can induce in the male. Some girls even went so far as to suggest that, in certain areas, nature had been assisted. From where I was standing, the results were still convincing.
“I’m on my way to a meeting with the head of the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. I haven’t been in Grantham in ten years. The old place doesn’t change much, does it?” Her climb up my steep stairs added to the breathlessness in her voice. There was also a nervousness. I knew she’d get around to her reason for this reappearance in my life after an agreeable ramble. “… But this isn’t a social call, Benny,” she said at last, as though she’d been reading over my shoulder. “I’m in trouble and I need help.” I pulled the best seat in the house from its normal place and brought it around behind her. We both sat down, but for Stella the act of sitting was a symphony for the eyes—my politically incorrect, unreconstructed eyes, anyway.
“Trouble,” I repeated. “Tell me. Tell me all about it.”
“First of all, I’m not Stella Seco any more. I’ve been Vanessa Moss for nearly fifteen years.”
“I’ve heard that name somewhere. Recently.”
“I married Paul Moss—”
“The disc jockey from the radio station! Deep voice, like roasted velvet. Yeah, I remember him.”
“I was eighteen, Benny. I was on my own again when I was twenty.” I nodded to show that I was keeping up with her. She rooted around in her bag for the cigarettes that, judging by her expression, she had recently given up. She found a candy mint, held it for a moment, then flung it back into her bag. I could sympathize with that. I had never discovered anything to replace my habit either.
“Life with Paul was very complex, even after I quit school. He taught me a lot about broadcasting, but in the end I couldn’t hack it. Paul, I mean. Poppa made him give me an annulment. I did a catch-up year in Hamilton, then did a three-year B.A. in Toronto. You quit school too, didn’t you, Benny?”
“I managed to hold on until I graduated. They didn’t have to burn the place down to get me out after all. We missed you when you left, Stella. It was as if all the lights went from one hundred watts to forty. Did you know you had that effect on us?”
“Benny, that was years ago. And how can I answer that anyway? I know I have a certain effect on people, but I haven’t worked it out to a science. I always knew I was a good-looking broad. The rest was—well …”
“Why ‘Vanessa’? How did you get to ‘Vanessa’ from ‘Stella’?”
“That was the doing of one of my mentors. I’ve had a few of those. He said it had something to do with Jonathan Swift. I’ve been climbing the rickety ladder called broadcasting, Benny. I’ve already met all of the people I’m going to run into on my way down. But at the moment, I’m sitting pretty, except for … Let me finish what I came to say, Benny. We can talk about the old days later.”
“Sure, Stella. I want to hear what you have to say.”
“Since June last year I’ve been the Entertainment head at the National Television Corporation. I knew when I took the job that it wasn’t going to be easy, but I didn’t expect that they would be literally gunning for me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Renata Sartori was an old friend of mine.”
“Have I heard that name too, somewhere?”
“If you tune in on our channel. I used to live with her when I first came to Toronto. Two weeks ago, she was staying at my place. I was away. She was alone, wearing one of my dressing gowns. She answered the door and somebody shot her in the face with a shotgun. Both barrels.”
“Jesus! That’s where I heard your name: on the news.”
“For a week, the cops thought that I was the corpse. Me! You can’t blame them, really. It was my house, my dressing gown and Renata’s face …” Stella winced, shutting her eyes for a moment.
“You can skip that part.”
“The press outdid themselves: ENTERTAINMENT HEAD BLOWN AWAY! NETWORK CHIEF BLASTED! That kind of thing. When I came back into town—I was away at my place on Lake Muskoka—I walked right into the investigation. Even the cops thought I was a ghost.”
“It’s like Laura!” I said. “You know, the book and the movie?”
“I know, I know. Now I know what it’s like to be Gene Tierney. It was a Preminger film; 1944 or ’5.”
“The heavy was—”
“‘That venomous fishwife, Addison de Witt.’ No, that was the critic, George Sanders, in All About Eve. This was Waldo Lydecker, played by Clifton Webb.”
“The cop was Dana Andrews.” I was glad to be able to make a contribution.
“You’re right. I forgot. Anyway, this is too much fiction coming true for me. Somebody wants to see me dead, Benny. That’s why I’ve come to you. I need help.”
“When exactly did all this happen?”
“Renata was murdered two weeks ago yesterday, Monday night around ten, according to the forensic report.”
“In the movie, the maid found the body. Who found Renata?”
“In the forties there were maids. I have a cleaning woman. And Lydia th
ought it was me. Everybody thought it was me. I’ve been dead on the front page of every Toronto newspaper, Benny. I had to call all my friends and relatives to say it wasn’t true. Now that I’m alive again, I’m just as vulnerable as I was before Renata was murdered.”
“Who do the police suspect killed Renata?”
“Me, for one.”
“You!”
“Sure. They say I was jealous of her. She was moving up in the Network hierarchy. She’d been given more responsibility. She even had a show of her own. Reading with Renata? Sunday afternoons? She hosted it herself. It made her into a minor celebrity of sorts. The show played against all the football games in the world. It had an audience of one. Wait a minute: that isn’t fair. She has built an audience. Not huge, in TV terms, but it’s as big an audience as any book show gets outside France.
“It’s true, Renata had come a long way from typing traffic reports and keeping the sports department within its budget, but she wasn’t going to move up very far from the production level. That’s what she knew about: making programs. That’s where her interest was, too. She invented and hosted this cheap, but well-produced, show that saved our bacon when an American series bombed after two weeks. Before that she was a damned good unit manager. A bean-counter. Was that mean? I make the widgets around here, she tells me what they’ll cost. She didn’t want my job; she wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
“So the cops have you figured for a leading suspect—”
“Among a large supporting cast.”
“They appear to have missed the point of Renata’s being killed wearing your clothes and in your house.”
“Exactly.”
“Who’s in charge of the investigation?”
“At the moment it’s Jack Sykes. He’s a sergeant of detectives. He was in charge of the Wentworth case at Rose of Sharon Hospital. Remember? Those kids with liver poisoning?” Stella, or Vanessa, was tugging on the clasp of her bag, clicking it in and out again. It may have relieved her nervousness but it added to mine. I was still having to reconcile all that she was telling me with the high-school beauty of my dreams. Light coming in through my venetian blinds banded her blouse and legs with agreeable stripes. Stella was still a member of the league of beautiful women.
“Stella, what is it you want me to do exactly?”
“I need your protection. That’s what you do, isn’t it? But, Benny, you’ve got to call me Vanessa. Nobody knows me as Stella any more and I like it that way. Understand, Benny? It’s important.” I nodded my head and held a quiet funeral in my mind for Stella Seco, girl of my dreams and nowhere else. But Stella, damn it, I mean Vanessa, went on. “I guess you’d say what I need is a bodyguard: someone who’ll follow me around, check out security, and get me out of tight corners. Yes, I need a bodyguard until this thing blows over.”
“Look, Vanessa, there are real people who do that. I mean for a living. I don’t carry a weapon, for one thing. And if I did, I’m not a crack shot. What I’m saying is that carrying heat and doing all that secret-agent stuff you see in the movies is miles away from anything I know the first thing about.” I could see right away she didn’t like this line of argument.
“No, no, no, Benny. I don’t want some rent-a-cop without a brain for anything but his next coffee break. I want you! I’m not what you would call a wealthy woman, Benny, but I pay better than the going rates. You will be provided for. You have my word on that.” Here she removed an envelope from her bag and looked as if she was about to hand it over. My fingers got that twitch they get when I’m about to go to work.
“You drive a hard bargain, Stella.” She caught my eye with disapproval. “Hell, I’m not going to be able to manage this ‘Vanessa’ thing! You’ll always be Stella to me.”
“That’s sweet, Benny. I’m still ‘Stella’ to me, too. So that makes a pair of us. But, damn it, in public, I’m Vanessa. You got that?” Then, without a break, she asked: “When can you start?”
“I can get rid of these few files this afternoon,” I said, lifting the paper litter above my McIlvanney paperback. “I can be in Toronto tomorrow afternoon.”
“I’ll book lunch at Dooley’s. They’ve reopened it. I’ll book my table for 12:30. After lunch I’ll show you my office and get you started. Officially, as far as the network goes, you’re my new executive assistant. That will open enough doors for you to get you started. Oh, and by the way, this cheque should cover your retainer and startup expenses. If it’s not enough, I’ll fix things when I see you. Goodbye for now, Benny.”
So saying, Vanessa was on her feet and heading for the door. Obviously, she didn’t want to hear about the details of getting my smalls to the laundromat or about other similar banal but necessary chores. I liked her style, but I could already see that her company was going to be exhausting.
THREE
Wednesday
The National Television Corporation occupied a large building on the west side of University Avenue in downtown Toronto. There was a weather beacon on the top floor of this skyscraper that tested the zoning by-laws regarding the acceptable height limits in that neighbourhood of hospitals, publishers and insurance companies. At the top of the beacon stood the familiar NTC totem, a big-eyed owl looking down at me. A nest of peregrine falcons, perched high under the beacon, kept the local pigeon population trimmed to the smartest and quickest of their kind. This was pure Darwinism, nature drenched in its own blood. Below, in the offices and studios of NTC, a sort of social Darwinism was practised. Here there was no job security. No forgiveness, no pity. Yesterday’s boy genius was today’s has-been. Budgets were quick to follow the wunderkind of the moment, along with suites of offices and charge accounts. All of this could be stopped without a word on paper. Here talented people grew old before their time. Heart attacks were as common as head colds. Only the locksmith was safe from the whim of the people at the top, who themselves were not safe. Any day could bring them down from their twentieth-floor offices. If they were lucky, they could then join the rogues’ gallery of the formerly powerful along a corridor on the fifth floor where you could walk past their open doors one after the other, like Easter Island heads, familiar spirits of an earlier day. There they sat reading The Globe and Mail and The New York Times every morning, hoping that today would summon them upstairs, back into the Technicolor of power.
Of course, I knew nothing of this the first time I was ushered into Vanessa Moss’s big office on the twentieth floor. Her secretary seemed sincere in her welcome. She found my name in the appointment book right where it should have been. Her offer of coffee or tea sprang from the pure joy of seeing me in the right place at the right time. Her smile and sympathetic manner, I found, went with the job. Sally was more or less connected to the floor and to executives at that level. If Vanessa fell from grace, which was what my research told me was about to happen, Sally would stay on to offer coffee or tea on behalf of her next employer.
Earlier that morning, I had driven around the west end of Lake Ontario and into the huge welcoming arms of the Megacity, Toronto. I found a cheap hotel on Bay Street, a sort of YMCA without a swimming pool, not far south of Elm, and unpacked. I turned the room, which had only one bed in it—unlike most hotels I’ve been in—into my headquarters. Everything I needed was spread out on the bed. When I was happy with the look of things, I walked over to Dooley’s on King Street, about ten minutes before the appointed time, where the maitre d’ informed me that I was being stood up by my client. In my business, being stood up is no great crime. Whoever writes the cheque at the end of the week carries a lot of clout. So, I swallowed my pride and had a sandwich at a place down the street called Quotes, where there were old movie posters under the glass of the tables and vintage cartoons on the walls. While I was waiting for my bill, I called the number Stella had given me. A polite but firm voice on the other end, Sally, as I later discovered, invited me to drop into “Ms. Moss’s office on the twentieth floor of the NTC building” at 1:30 and hung up. I shrugged at
the cartoon on the wall and took a taxi to University Avenue. Leaning back into the plush back seat, and reading the THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING sign, I started to get the feel of living on expenses.
At NTC I ran into a SWAT team posing as security guards. They wanted to know what my business was and whom I had an appointment to see. They passed my wallet around among themselves, checking my documents, and finally laid a big sticky label on me with the word “VISITOR” in loud letters. Under the word was the warning that this label was to be worn at all times and was not under any circumstances transferable. I wondered whether in the case of fire, only properly labelled visitors would escape roasting. As I looked about me, I noticed that everybody in the place was wearing labels. They were custom-made labels, naturally, laminated plastic, but labels all the same. But we VISITORS were the conspicuous ones; both by our badges and by the humiliated looks on our faces. We had the expression of restaurant guests forced to wear house jackets and ties before being seated. Meanwhile, the security police were phoning everybody on the twentieth floor, including, I suppose, the murderer of Renata Sartori, to let the world know that Vanessa’s most recent hireling was on the lot. I began to think, as I was finally cleared to go through a buzzing turnstile and frogmarched to the burgundy elevator, that maybe the people at NTC were not the creators of fun, entertainment and news coverage, but were guardians of the national hoard of gold bullion or maybe fronting for the CIA. It seemed to me that I had less trouble getting into the American Senate chamber in Washington. Anyway, I tried not to grind my teeth as I was wafted twenty floors above the sidewalk.
While I was waiting for my coffee, a skinny man with a nearly threadbare brown suit hanging on his bones came in and pestered Sally for a minute of Vanessa’s time. He whispered to begin with and kept raising his voice a few decibels higher with every refusal. “But I’ve got to see her, Sally. She promised!”