by Howard Engel
“Entertainment?”
“Exactly! The world revolves. Things are happening.”
“I haven’t heard that Vanessa Moss has been eclipsed. When was that announced? Her name was still on her door ten minutes ago.”
“While you are right to question the accuracy of what I’ve just said, I fear that the truth—that she’s not been sacked yet—is a mere quibble. But that doesn’t mean the blades are not being sharpened, my boy. The wagons have been circled, and the wagonmaster has a bee in his bonnet about that woman. Well, it’s only a matter of time.”
“I like your openness. It’s good to know where we stand.”
“You see, it’s only the commercial interests that have saved her this week. The CEO is trying to gauge the reception of our unloading that baggage with the murder thing still unresolved.”
“Are you saying that the advertisers are calling the shots? That NTC is run by snake-oil salesmen?”
“Oh dear! What a low opinion you must have of the medium, Mr. Cooperman. What I meant to say is that they are still trying to see if she fits their definition of a liability. If she’s not a liability—and that has to include all of the publicity she’s garnered both for herself and the network—can she be described as an asset? I think not.”
He must have read an uncomplimentary expression on my face.
“You know, Mr. Cooperman, we have a book of advertising standards that spells out the rules for acceptable commercials. Toilet tissue, for instance, must stress absorbency and softness, but without showing the product near anything made of porcelain. I think snake oil is banned no matter what the approach. We have recently gone in for brand-name companies taking a high-toned institutional approach. ‘The following concert by the late Dermot Keogh was recorded in Madrid with the support of the Morgan Armstrong Corporation and Bix-a-bix Cereal Products.’”
“You knew Dermot Keogh well. I’d forgotten that. I know people in Grantham who have all of his recordings.”
“Yes, dear boy. And he keeps on selling. Luckily, we have a great deal of him on tape and on compact discs. His reputation will not stop growing for another ten years.”
“I remember one summer, up at Dittrick Lake, I was staying with friends and he was giving a radio concert. Warm night. Stars. We turned the radio up loud inside the cottage and listened to the music on the patio where we could look out over the lake. The house became a kind of sounding board for his cello, so that we felt that we were right there at the concert. I’ll never forget that.” It hadn’t actually been Keogh I’d heard, but the adapted anecdote fit the situation.
“That would have been the summer before last. There were no concerts last summer, of course.”
“You said that there are half a dozen biographies about him in the works. Why aren’t you writing one of them? You knew him better than anybody.”
“Too sadly true. I don’t think I’m ready to ride his coattails into the New York Times best-seller list, thank you very much. I’ll not repay his friendship in that way. Why, during his lifetime, someone approached his father—old Michael was still alive then—asking him all sorts of questions about Dermot’s childhood. When he heard about it, Dermot was fit to be tied. ‘If you want to know about me,’ he said, ‘ask me!’ Oh, that wasn’t a good day to be close to him. No, indeed!”
“Was he unforgiving?”
“He was generosity itself in most things. I’ve never known a more liberal spirit. But, on the subject of his own life, especially of his past, he demanded and insisted on holding a tight rein on all the options.”
“A control freak?”
“Something of that. The real mystery is why would he bother. His life was as ordinary as could be. His father was a streetcar conductor and his mother was a kindergarten assistant in a private school. They were neither rich nor poor. Apart from his genius, he was a nobody. I think it was a matter of control for control’s sake. Ray should have known that.”
“Ray?”
“Oh, a friend of his. He went too far.” Rankin wet his lips with the end of his tongue before going on. I made a guess and I was right. He did change the subject. “Mr. Cooperman, it has come to my attention that your work here is at least partly a matter of security. Am I misinformed?”
“I’ve been trying to keep a low profile,” I said.
“Oh, yes, I can appreciate that, dear boy. Does that mean that we are all under suspicion? I just want to be clear about that.”
“Mr. Rankin, the detectives over at 52 Division are in charge of the list of suspects. As for me, I’m still trying to figure out who reports to whom around here and why nobody talks in the elevators.”
“In order to understand this place, Mr. Cooperman, I suggest you arrange a tour of the CIA facilities in Langley, Maryland. It will act as a primer for operatives in these corridors.”
“I’ll remember that. I always like to see the bad guys get punished in the last reel.”
“Oh, I can see that you are going to have a great success around here, Mr. Cooperman.”
* * *
Just after five o’clock, I picked up the information Vanessa had left for me, wished Sally a good weekend and headed out into the streets of Silver City without a care in the world.
For dinner, I wandered up to the Annex, and took my pick of the places that had survived my last stay in Toronto. There was the edge of audacity about my being in this neighbourhood: Sam, my older brother, lived here, and I saw him seldom enough that he would have insisted on my staying with him while I was in Toronto. Not that he enjoyed my company all that much, but he knew the right thing to do even when it killed him. I thought it might be better for me and my work to hold on to my independence and risk running into him on the street. But, avoiding Sam meant that I couldn’t call my parents in Grantham. I knew that Ma’s first question would be, “Have you called your brother, Sam, yet?” So, ignoring my brother was a double headache, one of those family kinds that nag at you whenever your mind clears of other things.
After my pasta and Italian coffee at Via Oliveto, I wandered the bargain-book bins at Book City. I bought a book with maps of what is called “Cottage Country.” I tried to outfit my planned expedition, but beyond what I’ve said, my imagination let me down. I refused to believe that somewhere north of here I might find it difficult to buy certain things. I couldn’t imagine what they might be. I wasn’t going to the source of the Nile, after all. I had no need for gun bearers or cleft sticks. To be on the safe side, I bought a two-litre bottle of mineral water and some dried apricots. You never know. After walking along Bloor Street, past the poor of the city sitting in doorways begging the price of a night’s peace, whether that was a mickey of rye or shelter, I began to feel weary. In spite of them, I felt snug in the heart of the great city. I looked in the windows of the stores on both sides of the street, nearly gave in to a sudden urge to visit Sam a few doors up Brunswick Avenue, but contained it by walking through Book City again with a vagrant mind. Well, not completely vagrant. Part of it at least was back on Belmont Avenue, where I had spent the night waiting for a steak to thaw on the kitchen counter and learning that love play can include the handling of a loaded gun. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the covers of the books on view. I drank in the titles and authors’ names. They all made a good case for their claims on my attention. Recent memories and the unpurchased delights before me rendered me useless for planning ahead. Only my stomach twisted with guilt as I saw all I had yet to read outweigh the little I had. I bought a paperback biography of Dermot Keogh to still the inner voice. I’d lied to Rankin earlier about having read the book. I’d only flipped through the pages. Here was a way to make my fib come true.
Outside, I wandered past the hungry and homeless, paid the pavement tax when I could think fast enough and moved off.
“Any loose change, mister?”
“Sorry, I’ve run out.”
“There’s a guy in that car wants a word with you.”
“Huh?” A gree
n car was parked at the curb.
“You heard me! Keep walkin’.” Before I could turn to get a better look at the source of these marching orders, I felt my arm grabbed hard and a push from the rear propelling me off the curb.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Shut up, Mr. Cooperman.” I’d been shoved into the back seat of a small car. It looked new enough and small enough to make this ridiculous. I’d been thrust tightly against the feet of a man already sitting in the back seat, when the man with his hand on my arm came into the car after me, slamming the door as the car moved out into traffic.
“What’s this all about?” I demanded, not knowing what to expect by way of an answer.
“I said, shut the fuck up! I’ll ask the questions.”
“Okay, I’m not hard to get along with. Ask.”
I tried to take inventory of my new-found playmates. There were three of them: the driver and the two beside me. None of them looked like he could take punishment from Mike Tyson on a good day. They didn’t look like Moose Malloy in Farewell, My Lovely. They didn’t look like dancers from The Phantom of the Opera either. They were youngish, with their hair short except on their faces, which were masked with carefully attended stubble beards.
“When are you going back where you belong, Cooperman?”
“As soon as I can. I’ve got business here, but I’d rather be fishing. Know what I mean?”
It was the driver who was doing the talking. He leaned over the gap between his seat and the passenger seat as he moved through the sluggish traffic. He was wearing a plaid shirt with a gold medallion hanging in the V opening. “It’s not that we don’t like your company around here. But your timing’s bad. You wanna try it again, later?”
“Yeah, in about another ten years,” added a voice from my left.
“Shut the fuck up, Sid!” said the man on my right. “Let Bernie do the talking.”
“The both of you shut up!” I leaned forward, and before I quite knew what I was doing, I reached out and made a snatch for the steering wheel. The two in the back seat grabbed me fast, but the driver turned the wheel to correct for the spin he thought I’d given it. But I’d never reached the wheel, and the car went careering into a car in the outside lane. There was a back-jolting shock as we stopped, the crunch of metal, the sound of a horn and some unexpurgated expletives from the other three men in the car. I collected a punch from my two neighbours. Then a horn or two from the rear brought the driver of the car with a newly folded fender out into the street to bang on Bernie’s window.
“Shit!” he said, opening his door. “I’ll deal with you later!” he added, turning to me.
Traffic was stopped and other motorists came to offer their versions of what had happened. Traffic on Bloor Street was backing up. There was a group of four or five pedestrians crowding our car when I said a polite “Excuse me” to my captors, pushed forward the passenger seat and took to the street. Apart from more expletives from the bearded trio in the green car, I didn’t hear another thing.
TWELVE
Saturday
Dark and early the following morning, I paid my hotel bill and forced my way, against the grain of incoming traffic, north, out of the city, up the big highway to vacationland. Slowly, the six-lane freeway lost the city’s strong gravitational pull. First to go were the fire hydrants and curbs, then the glimpses of parking lots and streetlights, and finally, I left the cement of shopping plazas behind. Grass and fields were a good exchange. Soon I was driving by cows watching me from under trees and horses running by white fences. With a stop at a place called Webers, where I ate the nearest equivalent to a chopped-egg sandwich—a hamburger and fries—I began enjoying my sudden freedom from Silver City. Two hundred kilometres north of the big city! Here TV was something you turned on when you felt like it, not a world that consumed you. If I told the kid flipping hamburger patties on the grill at Webers that Renata Sartori may have been killed so that somebody could move a little higher on the TV ladder to success, he’d say I was crazy. But crazy or not, here I was driving north to find hard evidence that my client was in fact at her cottage while Renata was being murdered in Toronto.
On the far side of Bracebridge, which stood exactly halfway between the Equator and the North Pole, according to an official plaque, I began seeing signs at the side of the road for a place called Norchris Lodge. I needed a place to stay on Lake Muskoka and Norchris Lodge was on Lake Muskoka, just where the Muskoka River empties into it from the highlands of Algonquin Park. I drove off the two-lane road I’d been on since Bracebridge, followed the signs and at a moderate speed made it to the gravel lane leading to the office. This was housed in a large log building with, as I later discovered, a monstrous stone fireplace. Through the boughs of trees and bushes, I could see glimpses of the lake, a beach, a water slide, docks, boats and a lawn with rustic bright red wooden chairs lined up to point out the view. It was early, the season hadn’t properly started yet, so I couldn’t see many guests looking at the lake.
Christopher McArthur and his wife, Norma, ran the lodge. They were a friendly young couple with several youngsters of various ages. They were all making lastminute repairs to window screens, door hinges, motorboat gear and sailboat rigging. I could hear a boy’s voice calling: “Stuart! Renée! Abigail needs you!”
“That’s Winston,” Norma said. “He likes organizing things.”
I told the McArthurs what I needed, and they told me what they could provide. Across the lagoon formed by the outlet of a creek into something they called “The Cut,” Norma pointed out a cottage called “Nova” or was it “Scotia”? Here I could cook or not cook as it suited me. The main dining-room of the lodge, she explained, wasn’t open for the season yet. I took a look at the cabin, which was luxurious compared to what I had been expecting. The shingles on the roof were partly covered by fallen pine needles. I could imagine what the place must look like under the falling leaves around Thanksgiving. I made a mental note.
Chris helped me get my stuff from the car. He was amazed that the Olds was still holding together. I guess there aren’t many cars of that vintage still operating on the forty-fifth parallel. The bed was comfortable, the bathroom well appointed and in working order. Through my windows, I could see a rack of red canoes and kayaks of yellow and blue. There were paddleboats, and motorboats for the more ambitious. A cream-coloured float plane was moored to a dock just at the edge of my vision on the right. A Japanese-inspired bridge joined together the land cut in two by the lagoon-like harbour, which ran behind or in front of several of the cottages. I also had a clear view, not only of the lake, but also of a most inviting hammock strung between massive pines. I was beginning to like this job.
In the hammock, less than twenty minutes after signing in, and looking at my pale, bare toes, I opened the paperback I’d bought at Book City about Dermot Keogh. It was a slim volume with pictures reproduced from magazines and newspapers. It had the look of a book flung together in a hurry on a computer, or several computers, judging from the many changes in font. The author was described as “a sometime critic and music lover.” The chapters carved Keogh’s life into convenient phases. From childhood and youth, we went on to triumphs in London, Moscow and New York. I saved the part about his untimely death for later, like it was the icing from my birthday cake. I was beginning to feel guilty about the hammock. This Cooperman had no real aptitude for relaxation. I knew in my heart that I had to get back to work.
A plan began to form in my twisted little mind. I would locate, if I could, Vanessa’s cottage. Inside, I would try to find some proof that she had been there within the last two weeks or so. I’d question the neighbours, speak to the gas-station attendant and otherwise try to place my client away from Toronto on the date of Renata Sartori’s murder.
I drifted into a thoughtful reverie, and from there slid into something more dream-like. I was back in my car, driving through a pine forest, which surrendered to tundra and then to icefields. I kept check
ing the road-map to see whether I’d come too far. Whatever I saw on the map, it didn’t convince me to turn the car around. The icefields became a frozen river, the right of way marked out by empty oil drums. There was a shimmer to the ice and snow, and I couldn’t see the road properly even with sunglasses. There was no other traffic on the single track now over a bleak frozen lake. I tried to turn the car around and managed to get stuck in the slush and ice at the edge of the frozen highway.
I was awakened from this suddenly by the sound of a steam whistle. Was a ship caught in the ice? Was a boat crossing the frozen lake? Then I saw my white toes at the end of the hammock. I looked up to see several people along the waterfront watching a long, narrow steamship moving at a steady pace through The Cut. Built low to the water, without being wide in the beam, white-hulled, she cut across the background of trees. As Cary Grant used to say, she was yare: nimble, lively, trim and gorgeous; everything a steam yacht ought to be, with lots of dark wood and brasswork gleaming even from where I was lying. She let out another whoop as she began her turn into the mouth of the river.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?” Norma McArthur was shielding her eyes from the sun to get a better look. “During the season, she puts in here, and you can go for a ride. She’s chartered now. Private charter.”
“What’s her name?”
“Wanda III. She was built for Lady Eaton. You know, the department-store family.”
“They still run her?”
“Oh, no. There were three Wandas. I’m not sure about their history. If you want accuracy, there’s a book inside. Let me see, the first was sold after she failed to get a kid to hospital in time to save his life. Very dramatic story. Wanda I raced from Port Carling to Bracebridge at twenty knots, but it wasn’t fast enough for a burst appendix. The second Wanda burned in a fire at the time of World War I.”
“Who owns number three?”
“The Muskoka Steamship and Historical Society. Local. But she’s chartered right now to Hampton Fisher, the TV and newspaper tycoon, and his movie-star wife, Peggy O’Toole.”