by Howard Engel
“So, you’re Cooperman,” he said at length, disappointing me with the clichéd introduction. Sheldon Zatz, whoever he was, was on to something in Sykes. You could fill up a lot of pages just describing the way he sat there drinking his cold coffee. I nodded and showed some teeth.
“And you’re in charge of the Sartori case,” I said, moving things in the direction of my preoccupations.
He said nothing, but he was running me through his assessment apparatus. I could imagine him sucking a toothpick. “Jim, this is the guy from Grantham that Chris Savas is always talking about.”
“Yeah?”
“He’s the one who does the Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade bit in Grantham. Population 1,280, right? No offence, Mr. Cooperman, but we’ve been getting whiffs of the legend from the Greek.”
“Cypriot, not Greek, sergeant. He makes a good case for the difference.”
“Whatever,” he said. “You worked these mean streets once before too, didn’t you? Something about a murder over a rare book?”
“That was a few years ago.”
“Yeah. Up in the Annex. I remember it now; you assembled all the suspects in a bookstore and pointed the guilty finger. Chuck Pepper told me about that. Right out of an Agatha Christie movie for television. You like private-eye movies, Mr. Cooperman?”
“Sure. Doesn’t everybody?”
“Savas told me you answer a question with a question. How is he? Has he made inspector yet?” For two minutes I brought them up to date about Chris Savas and his present status in the Niagara Regional Police. When I’d finished, Sykes shook his head as if I’d just asked him a question. “You know,” he said, “after all the shit going down in Grantham these days, I don’t know why a freelancer like yourself gets in his car and drives to Silver City looking for work. You know what I mean? When those tapes turned up under the false ceiling in the Medaglia case, after the place had been searched a dozen times, I mean, don’t you want to hide your head or something?”
“Are you making a soliloquy, Sergeant, or was that a question?”
“Don’t get me wrong. You weren’t on that case probably, being a rent-a-cop, but when there’s that much shit going down, a little brushes off on everybody whether they’re involved or not.”
“Like you collected in the Wentworth case?” I asked. “Kids are always getting their livers poisoned, aren’t they, when bad nurses are allowed to roam the floors of the Rose of Sharon Hospital at night.”
“There’s no crap on my boot, Cooperman,” Sykes said, straightening and getting his motion seconded by a groan from the chair. “The inquiry cleared us completely, or did your lips turn blue before you’d read that far? The papers are never so happy as when they’ve got a cop to hang out to dry, peeper.”
“Why don’t you tell me how you manage traffic lights and colour-coded index cards? Party games tire me. Why don’t we cut out the dancing around?” I got him with the colour-blindness: he blinked like a sports czar with his hand caught in the pension fund.
“What are you doing in my town, Mr. Cooperman?”
“I’ve been hired to keep somebody from getting killed.”
“Oh? So, you’re a bodyguard now! Next week it’ll be the secret service.”
I turned to Boyd and asked, “Is it the audience that gets him excited, or is he always like this?” Boyd opened his mouth as though about to utter, but closed it when Sykes stood up, letting his height, looming above me, play the cheap menace trick. I tried not to look intimidated, knowing all the time that he could chew me up in little pieces and swallow me without choking. I tried to look bored. “Why are you acting the heavy in this, Sykes? Didn’t I come to you? Didn’t I show my credentials? Didn’t I do the diplomatic thing? What do you want from my life? I’m just trying to make a living.” Sykes and Boyd exchanged looks. I waited. In his own good time Sykes moved my credentials across the desk towards me. Taking my time from him, I put them away in my wallet.
“Okay, if you’ll cut the crap, I will. I was just trying to see how you bounced. No offence. Saves time in the end. So, the Moss woman has hired you? You buy her story that she was the intended victim?”
“She hired me, didn’t she? That must say something. She’s scared that whoever killed Renata Sartori was really after her.”
“Yeah. We’re back in the movies again. But you could just as easily be a blind. You could be window dressing.”
“I didn’t come here to argue with you, Sergeant. You know a lot more than I do. This is my first day on the job. You’ve got a two-week hop on me and resources I can’t even imagine. If you think she did it, you must have good reasons. Since she’s not out on bail or in the lock-up, you can’t make a charge stick yet.”
“She had the motive, the opportunity, and we found the spent shotgun shells in her locker. Now, in my book, that puts the fancy wrapping paper around the package.”
When your eyeballs suddenly leap out of your head, there is hardly anything you can do to avoid looking like an animated cartoon of a cat being hit on the head by a large mallet. I took out my handkerchief and blew my nose loudly. I tried to work it out. I wanted to think. I thought of England, remembered the Maine, to help my breathing return to normal. I was smart enough not to speak. I nodded twice to give a sage indication of the assessment Jack Sykes had just made of the evidence pointing to Vanessa’s guilt. Of course, the whole scenario hit me all at once. Vanessa hadn’t told me because I might not take on her little problem. Shotgun shells found in her locker! She was damned right I would have stayed at home cultivating my non-existent garden. I was blazing mad at my own stupidity and more than a little upset by my old friend Stella Seco. I attempted a smile.
“You’ll have to convince me about the motive. She’s looking for people shooting down on her from above, not shooting up from below. I’ve seen her in action. She can handle the little guys without resorting to weapons larger than a pink slip. Opportunity? I thought she could demonstrate that she was out of town.”
“Conveniently out of town.”
“And I’m the convenient dodge to put you off. She hires me to show that she couldn’t possibly be the guilty party. Everything is looking suspicious because it’s convenient for your suspect. It’s one of those ‘if you thought that I thought that you thought that I thought’ routines. You can’t collar her with ifs.”
“You just see if I can’t.” He reached into the bottom right-hand drawer of his dull grey desk and lifted out a plastic freezer bag. Inside lay two used red shotgun shells. He threw the bag at me, and I picked it up. To me one shotgun shell looks like another, but I tried not to show it.
“You found these in her locker, right? Where do they get off having lockers in fancy offices like hers?”
“I wondered that too. She says that there are sensitive documents that need overnight protection a little stronger than your average filing cabinet or desk. I know that a locker closed with a—” Here he paused long enough to retrieve a second plastic freezer bag from the same drawer. “—combination lock isn’t Fort Knox, but you have to admit it’s safer than—”
“Where you keep your evidence, for example,” I said.
“During working hours, Cooperman. During working hours.” Again he tossed the bag towards me and again I examined it through the plastic. It was an ordinary combination lock that, by the look of its broken shackle, had been cut off by powerful bolt cutters.
“You’ve tried the combination of this lock against the combination you got from your suspect?”
Sykes looked me straight in the face and said, “Sure we did.” It was one of his little white lies. I could read that much in his partner’s face. Boyd didn’t say much, but he provided lots of information without troubling his vocal cords.
“Where did all of this take place, Sergeant?”
“You better call me Jack like everybody else or they won’t know who you’re talking about. You’re Sam, is that right?” For a minute I thought he knew about my brother who works across t
he street from NTC in one of the hospitals.
“‘Ben’ or ‘Benny’ will do nicely. And you get ‘Jim,’ is that right, Sergeant Boyd?” I asked, turning towards him. He nodded. The three of us took a breath and waited for the second act to begin on an even keel. Only it couldn’t start yet, because I had to hurry back to NTC to meet some of the possible villains in this case. And I wanted to speak to my damned client about omissions in her story.
FIVE
The meeting on the twentieth floor was a blur of names and faces. There was a balding six-footer sitting across from me called a comptroller, but what the two women bracketing me did, I never learned. I couldn’t begin to sort them all out. I counted the bodies, divided them into men and women and promptly forgot the result. There were about half a dozen women, maybe, and twice that many men. The men affected a studied casualness in their dress: leather jackets gently cupping generous bellies, sweaters from the Outer Hebrides and Irish tweed over Gallagher shirts. The women had adopted more conservative pant suits and tailored skirts, both real and imitation top labels. I patted my pocket for the Kit Kat bar. I’d left it someplace. I could only hope that there would be coffee and biscuits.
Printed smiles cut through the serious look around this monumental table. Such were the junior executives answerable to Vanessa. Here were some of the rivals for her job. All of them looked worried under the template of affability, anxious to impress Vanessa and each other. One of them, Jack McKellar, head of the children’s section, I think, tried to trip Vanessa up when she mentioned Gambit, a CTV program that she’d seen.
“Why were you tuned to CTV, Vanessa? Gambit is opposite our Unprivate Eye.” He tried to look bewildered.
“I’m moonlighting at CTV, Jack, because they don’t surround me with idiotic, back-stabbing yes-men. They pay me more into the bargain.”
McKellar wasn’t altogether clear that Vanessa had made a joke. Nor were half the others at the table. They tried to show expressions that could be read either way. Later on, Vanessa dropped in a homily explaining that part of her job involved knowing what the opposition was up to, that there was more to running her department than enforcing the No Smoking rules. McKellar was unconvinced.
Vanessa kept to an agenda. She listened to all of the section heads as they gave their reports, or what they called “the actual,” and kept the meeting rolling when it bogged down into generalities or—and I was surprised at this—gossip. I was amazed that these paper-pushers were in awe of the actors, hosts and anchor-people they had placed before their cameras. It was as though they had forgotten the parts they had played in making these faces so well known.
She introduced me at the beginning of the meeting. There were no smiles of welcome. No drums, no trumpets, no cheers. Executive assistants come and go too rapidly to pay much attention to the incumbent.
Vanessa asked for a progress report on “the proposed” from each of her section heads. Each, after his or her fashion, tried to bamboozle Vanessa into believing that progress had been made since last time. Vanessa was very clever in finding out which projects had made progress and which were standing still. Her idea of a meeting wasn’t just to rehearse the status quo, but to shake things down and slip through or around the bottlenecks. There were attempts at levity initiated by a few of the more secure people at the table, but they were killed off with a hard look from Vanessa. Even references to crazy Bob Foley, the independent runaway technician, couldn’t find a smile in the room.
“We’re still dangling on the Plath-Hughes special, Vanessa. The agent just isn’t returning my calls. It must be chaos over there.” This from a bright-eyed youngster who leaned back in his chair to the balancing point.
“Rod,” Vanessa said, staring anywhere but at him, “that’s where things stood last week and the week before!”
“I know, but you know the Brits.”
“Who have you got in London?”
“In London?” He was stalling.
“That’s the city we’re talking about. Who are you talking to there?”
“Vanessa, I’m—”
“Rod, your place at this table is under review. Do you understand me? Now get up to speed. There are no Jonahs on this ship. Audrey, since Mr. Sinclair is unable to help us, what can you tell me?” And so it went, on and on. Vanessa was critical of everybody. Even the few who could report progress had, according to Vanessa, missed a percentage of their advantage. I started to think how glad I was not to be working for her, when it came over me with a chill that I was. Was I staring at my future as I surveyed the smiling, unhappy faces opposite me?
The final item on the agenda was finding a replacement show for Reading with Renata. Vanessa gave credit to the producer who had thrown together a tribute show for the coming Sunday. But now it was time to find a permanent replacement. All around the table, it was thumbs down on another book show. Rod Sinclair may have saved his bacon when he told Vanessa about a fashion-show pilot he’d just seen.
“Okay, Rod. You run with it. But keep me informed.”
Afterwards, when the meeting broke up and Vanessa’s minions went to check whether their names were still printed on their doors, I got the feeling that I’d been through a document shredder. And they weren’t even aiming at me. After a washroom break, Vanessa sat me down in her office for a chat. While Sally went for fresh coffee, I thought I’d better clear up the unpleasant business of the omissions in my first conversation with Vanessa.
“Vanessa, I can’t be much good to a client who isn’t straight with me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“At 52 Division, I caught up with the story of the spent shotgun shells found in your locker. Did you think that if you said nothing the fact would blow away?”
“I can explain that. You’re not angry with me, are you?”
“You’re bloody right I’m angry. Do you have any idea how important those shells are?”
“They might have cleared me if it wasn’t for those goddamned shells!” She stopped there, as though she was measuring the importance of other things she’d saved me from knowing. “I was going to tell you, Benny, but we never got back there.” She moved a hand to rearrange a tress or two that had fallen over her forehead. “All right, they found the damned shells in my locker and say that they’re like the ones that the murderer used on Renata.”
“Were they yours?”
“Of course not! I’ve never owned a gun. And these shells didn’t have my fingerprints either. There were no fingerprints. Or at least, that’s what they say. Benny, tell me that you’re not going to be cross at me. Right now, the way I feel, I couldn’t bear that.”
“While we’re at it, why did you keep a metal locker in your office? That wasn’t picked out by your friend at Holt’s.”
“It was part of a pressure play. I’d ordered a proper safe for important papers, but Ted Thornhill was delaying things. You’d think a CEO would be above that kind of pettiness, but you’d lose your bet. I bought the locker myself, for practical reasons and to embarrass Ted. The week before Renata was shot, Ted spotted the locker, and I saw by his red face that I’d won the round. There, Benny, that’s the whole truth.”
“You’d better tell me the whole truth from now on. If you want to stay alive, that is. Maybe you have other plans?” She made contrite noises and underlined them all with body language, knowing that that was the sure way to distract me. Then she began to berate me about neglecting her. I reminded her that I’d been out of her sight only a couple of times, notably when I was checking in with the police working on the case. Then she told me to leave the solving of Renata Sartori’s murder to the cops; my job was keeping her, Vanessa, alive. She was no longer the supplicant asking for another chance, she was back in the driver’s seat, not a motion wasted.
“But,” I argued, “finding Renata’s killer could be a shortcut to the same end.”
“Yeah, and the cops are working that corner, Benny. Don’t crowd them. You stick with me. Watch my
back. That way I’ve got two strings to my bow, and I might still be alive in September.”
“Okay. I hear you. But, there are a few avenues I’d like to try out on my own, Vanessa. I know how to stay out of the way of the official investigation. They’ll know all about me anyway.” I saw the smile fade from her face. I was sinking into the same quagmire of disapproval that had caught Rod with his pants down. I knew I had to talk fast or I was going to line up with the other losers. “Look, Stel—” I did that on purpose to underline our special relationship. “You have told me practically nothing about what happened. I don’t know where you live, who knew you lived there, how long you’ve been in the neighbourhood or anything else. I need to know more about Renata: who her friends were, who your friends are. All that stuff. Where is your place in the country? when did you drive up there? who saw you? when did you get back? where did you buy gas? where did you stop to eat? Your life may be hanging from a thread woven from your full and unedited answers.”
She was angry at me now. Partially because she thought she had reached a position where nobody could talk to her like that and partially because she knew I was right.
“Okay, Benny, get out your notebook.” I grabbed a pad from my new desk. “I live on Balmoral Avenue. That’s two south of St. Clair, off Avenue Road. The place is owned jointly by me and my husband. I’ve been there for five years. Everybody at CBC, CTV and all the other places I’ve worked knows the place. I like to give big parties. Everybody in this building knows the house, the garden and maybe even how to get into the backyard from the cemetery at the rear. All of those people you met in the boardroom were at a party two months ago. I gave it to encourage our efforts before the sweeps. Talk about business losses.”
“What are the sweeps?”
“Benny! Your innocence is astonishing. It’s like not knowing what’s at the end of the Yellow Brick Road,” she said, smiling indulgently. Then she cleared her throat and began again. “The sweeps are the audience surveys run at fixed times of the year. Independent head-counters measure our audiences for a test week. Our advertising rates for the next season are based on the numbers they come up with. Part of our job is to make sure that our best efforts go into those important time-slots.” I scribbled all of this on the pad I balanced on my knee, and hoped to be able to translate my shorthand afterwards. She kept right on going.