by Howard Engel
“Commander Dunkery, please,” and waited.
“I hate surprises, Benny,” Vanessa said, checking the polish on her fingernails. “I didn’t want Raymond Devlin walking in on me unprepared. I’m lucky it went as well as it did. But I should have been warned.”
Soon Sally was explaining what had happened to the security chief. Meanwhile, Vanessa used the time to return telephone calls that were waiting for her on top of her desk. From the blur of blue message slips, she selected three, dumping the rest into the recycling bin. I tried to follow what she was talking about and make a note of the name of the caller. She used a slightly different voice with each call: Vanessa the repentant procrastinator, Vanessa the wheedler, Vanessa the straight-talking manager, Vanessa of the walking wounded, carrying on under difficulties and against doctor’s orders, Vanessa the neophyte seeking professional help. When I couldn’t take any more, I mimed my departure from the door, and she acknowledged it with a wave of coiled telephone cord.
Outside, there was Sally. Sally who wouldn’t be my pal. Sally who had to be watched. Sally whose loyalty lay outside this office. I wasn’t up to asking her for favours just then, so I skirted her desk heading for the burgundy elevator and the outside world.
SIX
Much later, in the dying minutes of rush hour, Sykes and Boyd were sitting opposite me in a Second Cup coffee place across the street from 52 Division on Dundas Street. The kid behind the counter, the one with the metal rings in his ear and nose, knew the cops when we came in, and gave me a look that tried to guess whether I was a suspect in a bank hold-up or a serial killer about to be brought to book. Boyd was still taciturn, Sykes still suspicious. I warmed my hands on the coffee mug and pulled at a Danish pastry contributed by Boyd. In the back of my mind, I was reviewing my last meeting with the official police team. I wondered whether this conversation would lead to another awkward confrontation with my client.
“Have you been talking to those people over in TVland?” Sykes asked, licking his fingers and shaking his head to tell me that he had been as bewildered by them as I had. “I don’t know how they get off being so full of themselves. It was like every one of them imagined he was being photographed and recorded all the time. Like they were being chased around by a film crew. Like they lived under a follow spotlight. I can’t believe it.”
“What do you honestly think of Ms. Moss’s theory that someone is trying to murder her?” I looked at Boyd, challenging him to offer a theory, a word, a grunt.
“Like in that movie? Dana Andrews and Jennifer Jones—”
“Not Jennifer Jones!” Sykes said with more passion than I’d expected. “It was what’s-her-name: Gene Tierney!”
“I think it’s what it sounds like: right out of Hollywood,” Boyd said, proving that the gift of speech was his when he wanted to use it.
“I don’t like the bounce on it,” said his partner.
“But, as you said, we are dealing with professionals at make-believe. To them there’s not much difference between a real villain and reruns of Law and Order. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah. I know.”
“What’s your stake in all this, Mr. Cooperman? Tell me again so I’ll get used to the idea.”
“I was hired to guard Vanessa Moss. Whoever it is out there probably has more shells for that shotgun. If it was a mistake the first time, he may try again.”
“What the hell can you do? You don’t carry. Maybe you’re a karate hero and we don’t know about it. And what the hell are you doing here? Your client could be dead four or five times while you’re shooting the shit with us.”
“That’s something you can take up with her. She’s within her rights. If she needs her head examined, that’s her lookout. Besides, I had to make contact with you guys. You knew I was here, so I had to drop around as soon as I could, or I’d be in deep trouble whenever our paths crossed later on, right?”
“Right. So you think we’ve got inside help?”
“How else would you know I was in town? I just got here and you knew all about me. It figures that you’ve got a snitch inside NTC.”
“Snitching’s a dirty job. Nobody loves a snitch. Does that hold for PIs, Benny?”
“I didn’t go looking for this job any more than you did. It’s all in a day’s work with me too. And frankly, I can use the business. She’s paying a good dollar plus expenses. I tried to talk her out of it. She thinks I’m a hotshot. What am I going to do about it?”
“Okay, so you’re the hotshot from Grantham, watching over a suspect—hey! That’s another movie, isn’t it? The one with the ‘Bell Song’ from Lakme, right?”
“It was from Lakme, but not the ‘Bell Song.’ It was a duet. Two women, like the two men in The Pearl Fishers. Close harmonies.” This contribution came from Jim Boyd. Next he’d be ordering vodka martinis, shaken not stirred. He was full of surprises.
The conversation shifted to internal police talk of retirement, pensions, holidays, dental plans and other collective benefits. I watched Boyd and Sykes. They weren’t excluding me, but there wasn’t anything I could add to the discussion. Still, they were having it in front of me, which might be seen as a sort of acceptance into the Toronto Police Grousing Society. I started counting the bubbles in my cup and collecting the crumbs of my Danish with moist fingertips. When I retired from doing private investigations, it would be because I’d found a less stressful way of making a living.
“Consultants aren’t worth shit,” Sykes was saying apropos of something I’d missed. “When you press them for the stuff that led to their findings, they won’t show them to you, because in most cases those findings don’t exist. Then they’ll tell you off the record that their findings were concocted on the basis of what they thought we wanted to hear. The customer is always right.”
“Depends on the outfit you use,” Boyd protested. As for me, I got up and went to the john. When I got back, they were arguing about something of more interest to me than portable dental plans. They were going over the evidence in the two freezer bags.
“Art Dempsey told me that these things haven’t been made since around 1935. Used to get them through the English Army and Navy Stores in London. After 1935, they went in for a different style. Same half-brass base and cardboard case, but different powder and printing. The wadding that went with the pellets into the victim came from the shells we recovered in her boss’s locker.” Boyd was muttering this to Sykes, who was listening with his eyes half shut. I took my chair and tried not to make it squeak as I sat down.
“That sounds right up your alley, Benny. If the shells were that old, we are looking for an antique weapon. Isn’t that the sort of thing private eyes in books are always running into? Indonesian stilettoes, bejewelled Tong daggers, Thug axes, antique sporting guns?” Sykes eyed me with a single open eye under a raised eyebrow.
“Sure,” I said, “when we can’t get murder by tiger whiskers in the stew or icicles rammed into the victim’s heart. Why, only last week, I solved a case of murder involving a gun that was fired automatically by a string tied to the door knocker. Killed three Girl Guides in a line. He did it for the cookies, I figure.”
Boyd laughed, and even Sykes cracked a grin.
“Week before that, I uncovered a mad archer who replaced her deadly arrows in the victims with icepicks when nobody was looking. She had me fooled for about thirty seconds.”
“Okay, okay! Enough’s enough. Chris Savas is right about you, Benny: we can’t bullshit you into going back home, can we, Jim?”
“Welcome to Toronto, Benny.” Boyd passed the sugar, which had been lying just beyond my reach. I took it as a peace offering.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, we were sitting in Boyd’s car outside a house on the north side of Balmoral Avenue. It was in an area of modest to big houses, sandwiched between main north-south streets. Sykes said that it was about a fifteen-minute drive from here to NTC. An old Catholic cemetery ran along the back of the house, Boyd told me,
leaving a skimpy garden behind to match the one in front. The three-storey brick house was attached to the two neighbouring houses, leaving a front door, still decorated with torn scraps of yellow “Crime Scene” tape, as the only access from the street.
The two cops rolled their bodies heavily out of the car and lumbered up to the house. Sykes had the keys to it and to half a dozen other places; these he slowly excluded from his selection. The door opened inward into a narrow hall, useful for storing a few overcoats and a snow shovel. A second frosted-glass door introduced us to the rest of the house. The opening side of this had been peppered with stray shotgun pellets, and a blackened smear in the same area reminded me why we were here. To the right were heavily carpeted stairs going to the second floor and, to the left, a passage to the kitchen in the rear. Someone had placed a plaid blanket over the bloodstained broadloom; otherwise it was impossible to go anywhere in the house without walking through the darkened gore.
The rooms on the ground floor had recently been painted; the lush carpeting looked less than two years old. The decorations and furniture were a credit to whomever Vanessa relied upon completely for this sort of thing. Besides a baby grand piano, there was every electronic media device known to man, mostly ranged in a black metal stack against one wall. The results were not uncomfortable, but there was a prepackaged feel to the effect. I tried to imagine the faces I’d seen a few hours ago around the boardroom table relaxing in these surroundings. No, the decor discouraged relaxation. There was a hint of the principal’s office about the dark wood accents and bookcases. If Vanessa herself relaxed, it was not in the front room.
The kitchen was white, bright and contemporary, with refrigerator notes held up by magnets disguised as tiny bunches of cauliflower and broccoli. I looked over the notes for something that would introduce itself as a clue. There were a couple of New Yorker cartoons with a media theme. One showed a bunch of groundskeepers sweeping the sidewalks and patios of New York’s Lincoln Center with witches’ brooms and gnarled wooden rakes. The caption read something about using only original instruments.
Whenever I looked at Sykes or Boyd, I caught him looking at me. Did they expect me to uncover in a minute what their whole team had missed for two weeks? That’s all I needed to cut the fragile bond of co-operation completely.
“Okay,” I said after an interminable silence, “what do you know about the terms of the victim’s stay here? Was she a guest, a tenant or what?”
“According to your client,” Sykes said, using both hands to make quotation marks in the air on either side of his head, “Sartori called Moss and asked to stay for the weekend of the thirteenth. Moss told her that she was going out of town and that she could stay the week if she wanted.”
“Renata had a good job at NTC. Didn’t she have a place of her own?”
“She was living, without benefit of clergy, with Barry Bosco, a lawyer, until she decided that she’d had enough of him. We got that much from Bosco himself. I gather that it was mutual.”
“Sure it was. Now tell me how come Vanessa Moss is your prime suspect and not Barry Bosco?” Sykes smiled at Boyd like I’d just delivered the straight line they were waiting for.
“Bosco was giving a speech to the Junior Chamber of Commerce in Orillia at ten that night. Twenty-six young businessmen say he was there. He’s not much of a speaker, I gather.”
“Let me repeat the question. Lake Muskoka’s farther away from Silver City than Orillia. Or it was the last time I looked.”
“Look, Benny,” Sykes said in an even voice, “if we were satisfied with our suspicions, your client wouldn’t be driving all over town in that Range Rover of hers. If we were sure, she wouldn’t have gone to see you in Grantham yesterday on her way to Niagara Falls. We’re watching her, sure, but that’s all we’re doing right now: just watching.”
I hate it when clients lie to me. I can live with it, but I don’t like it. Vanessa told me she was going to Niagaraon-the-Lake to see the head of the Shaw Festival. That’s a fair hike from the city of Niagara Falls. Either Vanessa was fibbing, or these guys should take a refresher course in geography. I decided not to say anything lest they haul Vanessa’s sweet ass to Dundas Street to answer some more questions.
I got up and headed for the front hall, stepping over the plaid blanket. “What were the lights like when you got here on Monday night?”
“It wasn’t me or Jim. We weren’t on the case until the next morning. But, if you believe what was passed on to us, the house was dark except for a light in the bathroom upstairs, a light over the bed, a lamp in the downstairs living-room and the hall light up there.”
“What about the porch light? I saw one coming in.”
“It wasn’t on.”
“Have you been here after dark?”
“Yeah. The hall light was behind her all right. The only light coming in was from the streetlight down the street. And that’s not enough to see bugger-all.”
“So? What are you saying?”
“What I’m saying is that the physical evidence here isn’t at variance with the mistaken-identity story. That version is consistent with the facts as far as we know them.”
“‘Consistent.’ That’s one of those hedging words you hear a lot of these days. What about the wounds? I’ve only heard that she took both barrels of a shotgun in the face at close range.”
“That’s it. She was dressed for bed and wearing one of Moss’s dressing gowns.” I thought about that and hoped that Sykes and Boyd didn’t see my involuntary twitch when an image of the crime in progress shot through my brain. I felt a dry retch coming too. I fought to control it, thinking of Las Vegas, for no reason I can explain.
“Okay. So it is possible that the murderer shot the wrong woman?” I tried to look Sykes in the eye.
“That’s one interpretation. One line of thinking, yeah, sure.”
“The other is that Moss did it herself, hoping that all of you remembered the same old movie,” I said.
“That’s one other line, yeah. We’ve got others.”
“Such as?”
“I thought the lady was paying you to find out about that sort of thing?”
“I never pass the free lunch, Jack. You never know when you’re going to be hungry next.” The detectives exchanged a glance. They were feeling superior and safe. Just where I wanted them. “Okay,” I continued, “so there are aspects that you aren’t ready to talk about. That’s fair. I can live with that.” I wasn’t happy about it, but what could I do? Argue? I thought that maybe they weren’t that far ahead of me in the investigation, and this “other line” thing simply created a wholly imaginary lead suggesting that all systems were go and that these two were on top of every aspect of the case.
A buzz sounded close by. Both cops reached for their cellphones. It was Sykes who was being summoned. Boyd put his set away slowly, as though this wasn’t the first time. He checked the pager on his belt.
“Yeah!” Sykes said, and then he repeated it a few times with different inflections before folding up his phone and putting it away. Both Boyd and I were looking at him. “The mystery begins to thicken,” he said with a grin. After a suitable dramatic pause, he announced: “They just discovered the body of Robert Foley of NTC in his Sackville Street house, stone dead, it would seem, from an overdose of sleeping pills and strong drink. You knew this guy?” he said, giving me the eye again.
“He’s a senior technician on the Vic Vernon late-night talk show. Last night he walked off the set saying, ‘I don’t need this shit.’”
“Looks like he didn’t need any.” I didn’t laugh and Boyd only showed a few teeth to be friendly. “The office just let me know because of the NTC tie-in. At the moment, they’re treating it for what it looks like. Or maybe you think it’s some kind of fancy murder, Benny?”
“Look, Jack, my life’s complicated enough right now without trying to match the plots of movies and TV series. If you’ll settle for suicide, that’s good enough for me.”
> “Who’s looking into it?” Boyd wanted to know. Me too, although I tried not to show it.
Sykes mentioned two names. Boyd winced. Sykes answered him with a shrug. I gathered that this was not the A team. “I’m going to call in and get a parallel investigation going. With everything else going on, this should get the ‘suspicious sudden death’ treatment. I want another team from Homicide checking this out.”
“Those guys you mentioned?” I asked. “They’re as bad as that, eh?” I didn’t get an answer.
“Are you all done here, Benny?” Sykes wanted to know. “You want to check out the second and third floors?”
I didn’t, but now I was determined that I would go through every drawer and turn up all the mattresses, just to show them. It took the next twenty minutes or so, and when I’d finished, I didn’t have anything I didn’t have when I got up that morning. If it was a moral victory, I was surprised how low I’d sink to collect one.
SEVEN
A hotel bed may be the ideal place for many things in this life, but sleep isn’t one of them. At least not in the New Beijing Inn. The traffic on Bay is slow to die, and it gets started again about the time the early edition of The Globe and Mail hits the street. Nearby construction also gets up with the pigeons and sparrows, most of which were camped outside my window.
I had ended my first day in Toronto by having dinner in the Treasure House, a downstairs Chinese restaurant that Sykes suggested, not far from the bus terminal on Bay. The steamed rice was good for a stomach that didn’t travel well or often. It was a friendly enough place and bargains were pasted up along the walls in Chinese characters. I got the idea that if you could read the language, you could dine for next to nothing. But I was on expenses, so I didn’t let it worry me. From there, it was a short walk back to the hotel. A small crowd had gathered outside the Chinese Baptist church just off Dundas. I walked closer. While there were several Chinese faces, most of them were non-Asian. It seemed a strange time for worship—it was pushing 9:45 P.M. When I saw the coffee urn in the hands of one of the women, I knew that I’d blundered into an AA meeting. I continued on the gohome trail. Every step seemed to be taking me farther away from the bright lights and wicked deeds of the Ontario capital. Two hours before midnight and Silver City was letting me down.