The Cooperman Variations

by Howard Engel

  Stan wasn’t gone long. When he came back, he said, “Bob Foley was Dermot’s chief boat wrangler on the Waome dive. The second person was Keogh’s girlfriend. Mike remembers her as a stunner. Says her name was Renata Bowmaker.”

  “Are you sure about the last name?”

  “That’s what the man said. He said that. Called her ‘my little Bowmaker.’”

  “Good and thanks, Stan. Tell me, if I wanted to sabotage somebody’s dive, how would I go about doing it?”

  “You planning to murder somebody?”

  “Remember I told you I was a private investigator? What I didn’t tell you was that in my spare time—and there’s a lot of that—I write detective stories. On the side, you know. You may have seen some of my stories in Ellery Queen or Alfred Hitchcock. And there are the novels: Haste to the Gallows, The Glass Key, The Dalton Case, The Lake of Darkness …”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve seen some of them!” I was glad to see we were both liars of about equal skill.

  “Well, in my new plot, the murderer wants to do away with his victim by tampering with his aqualung. I try to keep my fiction as close to the truth as possible. Is there some way that my murderer could alter the mechanism of an aqualung and get away with it? It can’t be something that the cops would find.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I see the problem. Let me think. I guess he could fill the tanks with carbon monoxide.”

  “Where would he get it?”

  “Good point. The cops wouldn’t miss something like that. He could send him down in a tank that was nearly empty.”

  “How can you tell the difference between a full and an empty tank?”

  “A full tank is a lot heavier than an empty one. Air has weight. A lot of people forget about that.”

  “But would you send out an empty tank from the marina?”

  “Not on purpose. Or maybe the murderer opens the valve and lets the tank empty as he and his victim head for their dive site.”

  “Wouldn’t that hiss? How could the heavy—the villain in my story—hold the tap open?”

  “You’re right. It’s a demand valve, so that there’s no leakage from just having the main on/off tap open. Yeah, and an experienced diver would feel the difference in weight. Hey! What about this: your murderer could tamper with the O ring in the regulator.”

  “The what?”

  “The O ring is a black ring made from neoprene or hard plastic. It balances the intermediate pressure in the regulator. Yeah, you could do it with a screwdriver. You see, there’s a balance chamber in there. It prevents the diver getting air at a pressure that isn’t right for the depth he’s at. O rings wear out like anything else. If the cops looked at it, they might catch it, but again, they might not. It could look like ordinary wear and tear.”

  “Does that mean I’ll have to make my murderer a marine engineer?”

  “Naw. Anybody who can read a manual could do it. Wouldn’t take long either.”

  “Could he do it with others around, say in the boat on the way to a dive?”

  “Look, let me show you.” Here Stan gave me a lesson in the fine art of sabotaging a perfectly good aqualung. All in the aid of crime fiction. He was right. It wouldn’t have taken a man like Bob Foley more than a few minutes to “fix” Dermot’s tank. But how could he be sure that Dermot would use it and not one of the others? Stan had an answer for that too. Using the Waome dive as an example, he pointed out that Dermot always rented the same tanks. They were made of an ultralight alloy and not the usual steel. “Your fictional victim could use special tanks too.”

  “Yeah!” I agreed. “That would make it easy.”

  I promised Stan that I would remember him in the acknowledgements to my next book. Before I drove away, he asked for my autograph. I wrote Sheldon Zatz on the lined paper he held out to me.

  “Could you make it ‘to Mike Coward,’ Mr. Zatz?”

  “I thought your name was Stan?”

  “It is. I was thinking of giving it to a friend. Is that okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “And didn’t you say your name was Cooperman?”

  “That’s right. But I write my books using a pseudonym, a nom de plume. Got it?”

  * * *

  A charming waitress in a long skirt, obviously a student enjoying a working vacation in Muskoka, cleared away the wreckage of a dinner of ribs of beef and Yorkshire pudding from our table and carried it from the dimly lit patio and into the main building of the Inn at the Falls. We had been talking about all sorts of things, Peggy, Hamp and I. Hamp described his expedition to the Queen Elizabeth Islands to dive through the Arctic polar ice cap. “We were supposed to be testing winter equipment for the army,” he said, “but that didn’t stop us from having fun. You may have seen our pictures in National Geographic. It’s an eerie world under the ice, I don’t mind telling you.”

  “That was Hamp’s second polar dive, Benny. He went the first time before we were married.”

  “Peg, that was off Cape Hooker on Baffin Island the first time. Scarcely within the Arctic Circle. Last year’s trip took us—”

  “Not me! I was in Arizona with Nic Cage and Michael Douglas,” corrected Peggy.

  “Yes. Of course, dear. Aaron’s Run kept you busy for three months. By ‘we’ I meant ‘the expedition.’ This time we were off the Disraeli Fiord at the top end of Ellesmere Island. We were on the site for nearly a week.” I nodded my interest from time to time, turning my head back and forth. Finally, Hamp forced me to pull up my end of the conversation with an account of some of my cases, beginning with the one in Niagara Falls. When I’d finished with an exaggerated version of a case that took me into the north woods in search of an evangelist who had “disappeared,” I took a sip that emptied my glass of red wine. That was when Hamp outlined the case of an American explorer who died mysteriously in 1871 on a dash for the North Pole.

  “It was a badly run show from start to finish. Lots of fights and rows. The leader’s body was exhumed from the permafrost nearly one hundred years later. It was perfectly preserved, of course. The body proved to be full of arsenic. Now there’s a puzzle for your enquiring mind, Ben.”

  “In history, everybody was poisoned by arsenic,” I said, remembering something from a few years ago. “Take Napoleon.”

  “Yes! A very interesting case!” said Hamp, shortly before Peggy excused herself to walk down to see the falls before the light was gone. That killed it. And about time too. There is something about Napoleon that either turns you on or turns you off. There’s no middle ground. We got up after a few minutes and, at a distance, followed Peggy down the steep and twisting path to the river. On the way, he quizzed me about the investigation. I talked as we walked.

  “A vexing case, I’d say,” Hamp said, his hands thrust deeply into his pockets. “A veritable three-pipe problem.”

  “Excuse me?” Hamp waved his hand to show that it wasn’t important.

  “May I ask who keeps you informed, Hamp?” I was tempted to call him “mister,” since the familiarity, which worked quite well with dinner, had now hardened into the old routine of my being professionally nosey.

  “Ted Thornhill is my main source, but there are others too. I’d prefer to keep their names to myself, if you don’t mind. Unless it becomes important later on, I mean.”

  “Not at all. Can you tell me how Vanessa Moss came to NTC? She seems to have collected a number of business rivals and, well, enemies since she arrived. I don’t know whether any of them would try to advance himself over her dead body or try to remove her opposition to dividing up her empire.”

  “You think that her enemies are that dedicated?”

  “Well, at least one of them could be. As you know, someone shot and killed Renata Sartori. She was staying in Vanessa’s house, wearing her dressing gown.”

  “Yes, I see. I see. I don’t know quite what to say to you, Benny. I first heard of Vanessa Moss a little over a year ago. She was still with CBC then. Her name came up twice in two separate meet
ings. Same day. I mentioned this to Ted Thornhill as a curiosity. Nothing more. A few weeks later, I heard from Ted that he was negotiating with the CBC to buy up her remaining contract.”

  “I know you’re not kidding.”

  “No, I’m not. Ted should have been warned by the eagerness with which the CBC entered into negotiations. I try not to meddle at that level. People learn from their mistakes. Perhaps I’m a teacher at heart. Although what I could teach Ted Thornhill about bad decisions is moot.”

  “Why do you keep him on, then?”

  “He is just that much better than his nearest rival. I swallow his imperfections. He’ll do until another comes along. People are so ambitious, Benny, they unmask themselves. No eighteenth-century French court official ever got more mail from the colonies than I get from ambitious time-servers at NTC. I hear about their rivals’ stupidity, their duplicity, their petty dishonesties, their ignorance. Oh, don’t get me started. I am sometimes forced to promote liars and swindlers to high positions, Benny, simply because the alternatives are even more disastrous. I’ll leave you to imagine the rest.”

  We had come to the riverbank, where the Muskoka River ran swift and black in front of us. Peggy had walked to her left, upstream and under a series of high bridges that criss-crossed the river at the waterfall. The sinking sun caught Peggy’s silhouette as she traced the edge of the stream back to the falls, which could now be heard more and more clearly.

  “She’s lovely, isn’t she?” Hamp Fisher said out loud.

  I wasn’t sure whether it was meant for my ears or not. I took a chance: “Yes, I’ve always thought so.”

  FIFTEEN

  Sunday

  For the rest of the weekend, I was content with my view of Lake Muskoka from the hammock at Norchris Lodge. I finished reading the Dermot Keogh biography, which left me with a clearer notion of the man. It reminded me that if I wanted to know more about him, I could catch his posthumous doings on the Internet. I made a mental note. In the hammock with my toes lined up against the view of pines and birches, that seemed like enough work for one day.

  In front of the fireplace in the lodge on Sunday evening, I had been reading up on the history of Muskoka, the Muskoka Lakes, the summer cottages of the Lakes. There was a book about poisonous mushrooms that tempted me. I saw myself becoming the only private investigator in the Niagara Peninsula who could detect mushroom poisoning. Norma invited me to look into the photo albums for pictures of summers gone by. Judging by the smiling faces, I’d been misspending my summers for some decades. Norma told me that Chris, her husband, was on a fishing trip with his brother. When I’d finished with the albums, I returned to the mushrooms. By the time I was ready to go to sleep I could tell an Amanita phalloides from an Amanita verna. It’s a start.

  Monday

  I heard the city beckoning. I knew that should Vanessa return from Los Angeles early, she would expect to find me on hand to defend her against sudden death in whatever form it took. While thanking the McArthurs and paying for my short stay at Norchris Lodge, I got directions to the hospital in Bracebridge. I headed there after a bite of breakfast in town at a Chinese-Canadian restaurant, where I tried to memorize the creatures of the Chinese zodiac from a paper placemat.

  The hospital was small, but busy. Orderlies, nurses and doctors were running through the halls as though they were on film that was being played at the wrong speed. The calm centre in all this was a woman in a crocheted sweater behind a glass marked “Information.”

  “Why is everyone running around this morning?” I asked. “Has there been a big accident on the highway?”

  “Welcome to the New Ontario,” she said with a mock grin. “We practise no-frills medicine these days. What may I help you with?” I told her and she looked up the room number. “Mr. Patel’s a pet,” she added. “Doesn’t get many visitors since Alma died.”

  “His wife?” Then I remembered.

  “Alma tried, but Ed could never see anyone after Lilly passed on. Alma ran his office and bought his neckties. Down the hall to your left and then turn right beside the stairs.”

  I followed these instructions to the letter and came out in a small cafeteria. Reversing engines, I got back to the main corridor and asked an orderly for the room I wanted. This time I ended up in a new wing that had been attached to the main building as an afterthought. I walked past the nursing station and entered the small room, trying to decide which of the four men in the room was Ed Patel. I decided that the grey-faced skeletal figure by the window was the best candidate. The name, posted in masking tape to the wall behind him, confirmed my diagnosis. He was dozing over a copy of National Geographic balanced on his blue hospital gown. I saw that it was open to a picture of Lawrence of Arabia dressed in his flowing Arab costume. Ed Patel opened one eye and stared at me. Then his other eye opened, and they both examined me for a full thirty seconds. The magazine slipped from his chest to the edge of the bed and then to the floor.

  “I haven’t seen you before,” he said. “Which agency sent you? Are you Community Care or Centra? I told them I can’t go home yet. My house’s been sold and the apartment’s still unfurnished.”

  “I’m not from any agency, Mr. Patel. I’m just a visitor.”

  “What church sent you? I don’t hold with churches nowadays. I’ve tried them all.”

  “I’m a friend of Vanessa Moss, whom you probably know as—”

  “I know, I know, I know. Is Stella at the cottage?”

  “No, she’s in Los Angeles. She asked me to see how you’re getting on,” I lied.

  “Well, that won’t take long. They keep telling me that my time here’s run out; they want to move me, but I can’t see how they can do that with all of these tubes running in and out of me.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. He didn’t look as though he would ever travel again. His brown skin was as grey as death itself. I didn’t want him to read that in my face, so I stooped and retrieved the magazine. I put it down on the moveable table that straddled the bed.

  He glanced at the magazine cover. “I once went to visit his house at Clouds Hill in Devon,” he said.

  “Whose house?”

  “Lawrence’s, of course. Tiny, nearly windowless place, hardly room to feed visitors. He sat the G.B. Shaws outside and fed them alfresco. Fed all his visitors that way. Okay for Shaw and Charlotte: they could munch on carrots. But what about Churchill? I can’t see him putting up with the muck Lawrence lived on. Lawrence couldn’t stand the smell of cooking. He sustained life on tinned fish, I think. But the Shaws knew better than to expect a banquet. I met the lad—one of the lads—he died trying to save, you know.”

  I tried to show some interest. As he talked, he was rubbing his blanket between his thumb and forefinger. Perhaps there was a lurking memory of real blanket fuzz. He wouldn’t find any in these blankets. Ed Patel continued with his story: “There were two of them, on bikes, riding abreast even though they were told not to. Lawrence came on them as he reached the top of a hill and ran his Brough off the road to avoid hitting them. Saved their lives at the cost of his own. He lingered for nearly a week, never regained consciousness. That’s the way to go, eh?”

  “I guess it is,” I said lamely.

  “Not like this with all these pipes and tubes showing what’s not working inside.”

  “Is there anything I can get you?”

  “I don’t suppose you have a copy of The Seven Pillars with you? Or even Revolt in the Desert, I reckon. Oh, well. What about a Perry Mason mystery? There aren’t many of them I haven’t read. But now my memory’s so poor, I can read them all over again. What did you really come for? I won’t remember your name, most likely, but you might tell me just to humour me.”

  I did that, and he nodded while trying to boot his memory to receive and store the information.

  “Is Stella in trouble? What can I do?”

  “She thinks that there might be somebody trying to kill her,” I said.

  “And she’s mad
e a heap of enemies at that city job of hers.”

  “You don’t miss much.”

  “I’ve got the mentality of a small-town lawyer because that’s what I am. In other words, I’m a snoop. But I’m getting behind. I used to enjoy being in the thick of things. I once had four federal cabinet ministers at my dining-room table. Bet you don’t believe that. It wasn’t planned, it just turned out that way. My cottage was always like that, especially when Lilly was alive. Everybody loved Lilly.” He seemed to drift into a reverie, thinking of the absent Lilly, and I let him.

  “Stella’s dad and I were fishing buddies. Saved my life at least twice. Both times in fast water.”

  “What do you know about Dermot Keogh?” I asked. He blinked at the change of subject.

  “Fine gentleman. A bit wild, maybe, but solid, if you know what I mean. He could separate the serious from the frivolous when he had to.”

  “What was he to you?”

  “He was a neighbour. For two years I didn’t know he was famous. He’d never tell me.”

  “He shared your interest in old motorcycles, I believe?”

  “He was a collector. Had a fine Brough. And a Crocker. They’re getting scarce.”

  “Would you know all the Brough collectors?” He nodded, quickly. There can’t have been that many. “Does the name Bob Foley ring a bell?”

  “Foley? Foley? Yes-s-s. He used to drive Dermot around. Only man Dermot would allow behind a wheel. Stella had no use for him. She’d wince when his name came up. Scared of him, I think. He had an appetite for bikes, though, but he didn’t own any. He was just hungry. Collecting bikes is not a poor man’s game. Not any more.”

  “What happened to Dermot’s collection?”

  “He left ’em to a British collector name of Horwood. Sir Harry Horwood. Very fine collection. It’s all spelled out in the will.”