The Cooperman Variations

by Howard Engel

  “I haven’t lost my grip yet.” I didn’t bother telling her of the incident in the lobby of the Hilton, or that my relationship with reporter Turnbull did not involve Vanessa or NTC. She might not know how to take it.

  Vanessa leaned back against the eggshell white of the wall, flattening her body, trying to make a smaller target. When the wall failed to enclose her, she shifted her weight and came over to the couch where I was sitting. She moved slowly, giving me a sense of her perfume, and sat next to me. I wondered where George, the car jockey and computer animator, was at this time of night. When she started to get close, I let her. Anything to calm her down. It’s funny, I mean, I’d always been attracted by Stella Seco, even though I’d put it on hold for a dozen years or so. Now that she was Vanessa and my employer, I thought of what she needed before consulting my own usually healthy appetite. I thought of Anna, off in Tuscany. I thought of all she meant to me. I thought of Tuscany and the peanut-grower from California. Mushrooms. What the hell?

  She had allowed her dressing gown to fall open both at the neck and again lower down, so that there was a fair amount of Vanessa on display and in the most beguiling way. I decided that what she wanted was a hug. Where’s the disloyalty in that? It was the least I could do. We all need hugs from time to time. Especially when we’re scared. Possibly good-looking women don’t get their fair share. Men are easily discouraged in a face-to-face encounter with the object of their desires. A pretty face, in spite of a come-hither look in those beautiful eyes, often has the effect of forcing a strategic retreat on the timorous seducer. So, I didn’t get either flustered or my hopes up. It was, as I said on my way in, all part of the service. While I was still seeing myself in terms of the steadfast little sentry at the door, the hug developed into something more serious, and the brave sentry could hardly abandon his musket at a time like this. Besides, the steak for my eye was still thawing in the kitchen.

  ELEVEN

  Friday

  Staff Sergeant Jack Sykes shook his head sadly. He fussed with paper on his desk.

  “You’ve made some powerful asshole mad at you, Benny.”

  “What are you talking about? I told you, I walked into a door. It can happen to anybody. You can hardly see it.”

  “It’s not the eye I’m talking about, Benny. It’s your making free with the division offices and your fraternization with two of its finest officers.”

  “Somebody’s been on the blower, Benny,” Boyd added, just to make me feel good, “and he or she’s been complaining.”

  “For crying out loud, I don’t even know anybody in Toronto. I’ve only been here since Wednesday.” Now he was nodding, agreeing with me, as though that made a difference.

  “I know. I know. But I have my orders. I’m sorry, but I can’t have you dropping in here any more.”

  “What do you mean?” I was leaning over Jack’s desk, trying to keep my eyes off the word FRAUD, written on the open edge of the Toronto phone book. The last one said VICE. He just couldn’t help swiping things. He was also busy trying not to look me straight in the eye. Jim Boyd was sitting off to one side, attempting to look neutral, still wearing that silly summer hat. He, too, was not big on eye contact.

  “I shouldn’t even be seen talking to you. That’s how bad it is. The way I see it is that somebody in NTC has raised a stink about you being so close to the investigation, and you working for one of the leading suspects in the case. You haven’t been passing out your professional cards down there, have you?”

  “Vanessa Moss is the only person who knows. Except—”

  “Except for all the part-time snoops that run around like laboratory mice from office to office, telling tales out of school. One of them thinks he can pick up the phone and complain. I don’t like getting pressure from College Street, which just happens to be the source of most of my headaches, but in this case, I have to agree the Chief’s got a point.”

  “The Chief!”

  “Yeah. For a snoop from Grantham you’ve been making big waves.”

  “So, let me get this straight: we’re no longer cooperating? Is that it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Wait a minute! When were we co-operating anyway? I paid a courtesy call. That’s all.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you, Benny. I’ve heard the word from on high. When does a plain cop get to be so independent he can ignore a straight order?”

  “You’re not going to tell me about those 222s, are you? And I’ll never hear about the combination lock on Vanessa’s locker either.”

  “Of course not. That would be a direct contravention of my orders. What do you think, Jim?”

  “Oh, yeah. The order says all contact must stop at once. No more free lunch, Benny.” Jim was trying to free a piece of his breakfast, lodged between molars, with the corner of an official-looking piece of bond paper. Then he looked over at his partner. “Jack, my mind’s going soft. What was it Art Dempsey said about those pills? Refresh my failing memory.”

  “How many times …? Jeez! Twenty-five of the thirtyeight pills were a powerful anti-depressant. Among its listed side effects are drowsiness. You wanna stay away from machinery, especially cars, unless you’re riding in the back seat. Take some of that and you don’t want to be behind the wheel of a Range Rover. Not even in Grantham. You want to know the name? Desyrel. One hundred milligrams. Little devils look like 222s if you don’t look close.”

  “Well, thanks at least for that.”

  “For what? I wasn’t even talking to you.”

  “Right. And thanks for … for … giving me street directions to the YMCA.”

  “Okay, always happy to help out the tourist trade, but that’s the end of it.”

  “Have you checked out that lock yet?”

  “Get out of here! What’s with you and that goddamned lock, Benny? I swear to God I think you think the killer’s hiding inside the lock like a—a—troll.”

  “Imp?” I suggested.

  “Sprite?” Boyd said. Both were better than troll.

  “Will you get out of here? Until I see how this bounces, Benny, I gotta watch my ass. In the meantime, don’t walk into any doors on your way out.”

  “Sure. See you fellows around,” I said lamely, and backed away from the desk and out the open door. Slowly—because I didn’t want to outrun them—I walked down the echoing corridor and out into the marble halls of the lobby or whatever they call it. The desk sergeant looked at me, and I read into his expression that he too had been instructed to give no help. I thought of asking him for directions to the art gallery next door, but I felt too bad to be playful. The Yellow Brick Road to Paranoia was stretched out before me. I knew I had to get a grip on myself. I felt like the fat man in Shakespeare, the one who gets shafted by the young king. Falstaff! I thought, Yeah, Jack will call me tonight. He’s only going through the motions. That wasn’t Jack Sykes talking. That’s why the door was open, in case someone was listening.

  Over coffee at the Second Cup across the street, where I’d had my first long talk with Jack and his partner, I pondered the changes in my position. The cops held all of the hard evidence in both the cases I was interested in. I’d even been some use to them: helping them to justify linking the two deaths and being on guard about the appearance of suicide in the Foley business. I wondered whether Sergeant Chuck Pepper was included in the ban. The Chief might not know about the Cooperman-Pepper axis yet. That might still be a live connection, but not one I cared to try out until the dust settled. Even as I went over the ground, I still half-expected Sykes or Boyd to walk into the café and pick up the tab like last time. But they didn’t.

  Back at Vanessa’s NTC office, I weathered Sally Jackson’s painful apologies for the way our quiet drink ended. She was very kind about my eye, which had turned an impressive purple with a rim of pale yellow reaching through green for blue. She reported that Gordon had gone off meekly into the night almost as soon as Sally had explained who I was. This kind of behaviour, she
reported, was new to Gordon, and probably wouldn’t happen again. “He tried to sleep in his car last night, parked across from Crystal’s apartment, but he was made to move on by the cops. Now he thinks I called them. I know, because he was on the phone in the middle of the night. I’m at my wit’s end with that man, Benny.” Sally was looking a little wilted this morning. She’d taken extra care dressing and making up her face. The results showed more about her rough night than her voice did. I wondered whether Ken Trebitsch gave her a little extra on the side for being his snoop in Vanessa’s kingdom. I was guessing that it was Trebitsch who called the Chief.

  “Where’s her ladyship?”

  “Closeted with Mr. Thornhill. He called early; she had to reschedule two meetings.”

  “What does Mr. Thornhill want?”

  “Hard to say. He’s been on her back all week. He wants changes in the department. I know that. She’s not giving him an inch. She’s fighting him on the changes. So far, there are no winners.”

  “Is Mr. Thornhill in this alone, or does he have allies?”

  “Oh, Ken Trebitsch has his hands in that pie too. A bigger bite of prime time might make him smile. He might even take me to lunch without pumping me for information. Ken’s an empire builder of the old school. Thornhill likes him, because he knows the type. He’s easier to understand than someone like Ms. Moss.” This sounded like a confession. My black eye was paying off in spades.

  “Do you trust Trebitsch?”

  “As far as I can throw a baby grand. He’s had people in here measuring the floor space. How’s that for undermining the opposition?”

  Before I could answer, Vanessa was suddenly standing there in the doorway. “Undermining what opposition?” she demanded. Her eyes looked as though she wanted to hit somebody. Anybody.

  “I was asking about Ken Trebitsch.”

  “That son of a bitch! He’s got more clocks on the wall of his office than CBS, NBC, ABC and Switzerland put together. He’s the sort of newsman who’s just bursting to yell, ‘Sweetheart, get me rewrite!’ The only trouble is that he wouldn’t get the joke. You have to recognize a cliché before you can see the fun.”

  “You’ve had a rough morning,” I said, trying to change the subject.

  “All my mornings are rough, Benny. You should see some of them. They dump their slag on my afternoons, which are worse.” I thought that after last night she might have lowered her gunsights. I never figured out why I was the favourite target for her black humour. Almost everything she said suggested that she was the only one who did any work at NTC. I don’t know what she was complaining about. She was still alive, wasn’t she?

  Vanessa was wearing a charcoal grey pant suit with a white shirt that aped an Oxford button-down. She wore it open at the neck without a tie, just the way I like it. Her hair had abandoned the loose, newly combed look of the previous evening, and was now severely bound by an unforgiving silver clasp. “You’re expected to attend me this afternoon, Benny. My afternoons are dillies. Friday afternoons are the worst of the bunch. Especially now that this damned Dermot Keogh Hall is in the works.”

  “How does that make it worse?”

  “Where to start?” She took a breath. “Raymond Devlin is looking after Dermot Keogh’s estate. You know that. Since he decided to give a big whack of that money to us, he has been demanding first-class treatment from Ted Thornhill. Well, big, brave Ted has passed him on to me as often as he could. Ray needs a lot of hand-holding, Benny, and I’ve been elected to do most of it. After all, he can still back out if he wants to.”

  “What about those papers I witnessed in your office?”

  “That’s just for the building. He’s got I.M. Pei to do the design. Did I tell you? He’s the best. The big money will come later to sustain programs and endow concert series. Ray wants to keep a continuing interest in the Hall, even after it’s been launched. We’re going to see a lot of Ray Devlin around here in the next few years.”

  She rested a small briefcase on the edge of Sally’s desk and opened it. She sorted some papers and left three with Sally. Then she added, as though it had just occurred to her: “Benny, I’m off to L.A. tonight. I’ll be there for four days, maybe longer. I’ll be back Tuesday at the earliest. I have to see the new man at Universal to get something solid in the way of deadlines and delivery dates. I’ve got to take a meeting with Max Winkler at Warners to settle the fall schedule. You got all that?” She was relaxing a little behind her rapid-fire stream of talk.

  “I’ll pack a bag,” I said.

  “What for? Nobody on the coast is trying to kill me.”

  “But, where better to nail you?”

  “Your job is here.”

  “But, Vanessa!”

  “I’ve thought it through, Benny. I can look after myself in L.A.” There wasn’t any point in arguing further.

  “I’ll unpack,” I said. “Do you want me to drive you to the airport?”

  “George is driving me, Benny. Now he drives as well as parks. He’s moving up in the world.”

  Later, just when I was getting tired of moving from floor to floor, maintaining radio silence in the elevators and being dragged limp from meeting to meeting with Vanessa, I discovered that Vanessa kept up communications between appointments on her cellphone, which she used as she walked down the corridors. Once she emerged from the Ladies’ with the phone to her ear.

  “Mark, are you listening to me, Mark? I want no more monkey business from you. I want the first six episodes, as you promised, on the agreed date. No ifs, ands or buts. So fix it up and get the six shows to me on time.”

  Then she was in a wrangle with another outside producer. “Yesterday’s Headlines, Frank, is a game show. Why show it to Ken Trebitsch, sweety? Game shows are Entertainment, not News. Yesterday’s news is history, Frank, and that’s Entertainment. Capisce?” She lowered the cellphone and dumped it in her bag.

  When I found a clear moment, I asked her more about her place on Lake Muskoka. While we waited in a very empty boardroom, between meetings, she filled me in on the details of how to get there and where to find the keys, which were kept hidden in an old barbecue under a leanto with other half-discarded junk such as paddles, broken oars, folding chairs and old sun umbrellas. She didn’t question me about what I was planning. To tell the truth, I don’t think she cared much. She had already moved out of Toronto and its problems; she was already in Los Angeles defending NTC interests against the moguls at Universal and Warners. When I bugged her to give me numbers where she could be located, she said she’d leave them in an envelope with Sally. We got through the whole afternoon without once looking into one another’s eyes. Last night was already in a sealed box, dropped overboard, only leaving me with the knowledge that she slept with a loaded gun under her pillow.

  I don’t know what to say about that part of the night before. As I said, it began with a hug, but it quickly got out of hand. I have been with a few women in my time, but never have these encounters had so much violence and passion and so little personal feeling. Vanessa was good in bed, but scary. When the gun came out from under the pillow, it did nothing for my ability to concentrate. After she had pressed the muzzle into my groin, I tried to get it away from her, tossing the bedclothes around, and she fought, biting and kicking, until I’d thrown it across the room. She tried to retrieve it, but I held on to her. I’ve got scratches on my back to show that she didn’t like being handled this way.

  When I’d showered and dressed, I found that she’d thrown a blanket and pillow on a couch for me. The bedroom door was closed.

  At one point in the afternoon, the producer Eric Carter joined us just long enough to gloat over the fact that his Christmas show was in the can, on time and less than fifty thousand dollars over budget, which was almost like being under budget, judging from his grin. Vanessa took the news soberly and sent him off with some scripts for series pilots to look at over the weekend. Was that a way to say thanks in television land? I wasn’t sure.

&nb
sp; While Vanessa dictated a string of letters to Sally, I went digging in the kitchen for something to eat. I found a brownish orange and half a lemon, nearly turned to stone. I tried these with boiling water and some sugar cubes and promised to treat myself better next week.

  “Oh, Mr. Cooperman!” The voice came as a surprise as I strolled the corridor away from the Men’s. I looked behind me. At first the hall looked empty of all but the usual traffic on the blue broadloom—people with letters to photocopy, coffee mugs to return and reports to rewrite—then I saw an arm waving from an open doorway. As I walked back towards it, I tried to recall the fruity voice that hailed me. The answer came a moment before my eyes confirmed my guess. It was Philip Rankin, Music Department. Puffy face, like a fish drowning in air. One of the people trying to get Vanessa to leave NTC. I nearly laughed out loud as I tried to imagine him holding a shotgun.

  “You’ve had a merry thought,” he said, waving me into the darkish room. I was surprised that my face was so legible.

  “Just surprised that you remembered my name, that’s all.” Rankin’s office was one of the larger kind, with a door leading to a receptionist or secretary, the usual way of gaining entrance to this holy of holies. But Rankin kept his private door open from time to time to catch the traffic coming and going. I couldn’t make myself believe that he was on the lookout for me particularly.

  “Take it as a compliment, dear boy. They don’t come around that often that you can ignore them. Accept them, grapple them to your heart and cherish them. But, be on your guard, my dear fellow. These corridors are crowded with spies and deceivers. Take care.” He placed a canny finger alongside his nose.

  “I thought a ‘merry thought’ was a wishbone.”

  “I’m serious, Mr. Cooperman. This place is as packed with false friends as a piñata.”

  “Why would anyone bother? In the short time I’ve been here I’ve learned that the executive assistant is the lowest form of life.”

  “Nevertheless. You are close to a hotly contested area.”