The Cooperman Variations (10 page)

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.

I bought a paper and a
TV Guide
and spent some time in my room watching the NTC late-evening shows. Spread out with my paper on the bed, with the TV blaring, I felt as though the colour was draining out of my life and finding a new home through some electronic transfusion in the box. Everybody on the tube seemed to be having one hell of a fine time. Even Vic Vernon, the talkshow host, was in good form. He was interviewing a diplomat just back from Albania, while a strongman from a circus was having a cinder block broken on his chest through the agency of a blonde, leopard-skinned bodybeautiful with a sledgehammer.

Vic took a moment, with his face close to the camera, to pay a solemn fifteen-second tribute to the late Bob Foley, a friend to all and a brother to everyone on the show. Then, without a wasted second, he grinned to the camera and announced that he would be right back. When he returned after what seemed to me an endless stream of commercials, he talked to a young actress who had just played a young man in a movie. On the face of it, it was unlikely casting. The conversation didn’t touch on playing a particular character, it lingered on the cross-dressing aspect. I yawned and switched off the set. I’d given my pint for today, I thought, and picked up the paper.

It was sometime after that when I dimmed my light and discovered the problems of the bed and the bedding. The bedding made a good first impression: it was white and wrinkleless, smelling of Bounce, but on closer acquaintance, it proved to be sleep-resistant. I could make no lasting impression in the pillows, punch them as I might. At least the moving shadows on the ceiling were a distraction. If I got any sleep, they probably paved the way.

Thursday

I was in the office before Sally Jackson had changed out of her walking shoes into her sitting-behind-a-desk shoes. She wasn’t particularly happy to see me. She told me that Ms. Moss never appeared before ten, as though this were a natural phenomenon comparable to the tidal bore on the Bay of Fundy.

“By the way, Mr. Cooperman, you had a call a few minutes ago.” She handed me a blue slip that was covered with numbers.

“What kind of call is this?” I said aloud, although I hadn’t meant to.

“Overseas. Would you like me to get it for you?” I nodded vigorously and handed back the paper. In under a minute she said my name. I picked up and said “Hello” without much conviction.

“Benny? Is that you?”

“Anna!
Where are you? How’d you find me?”

“Rapolano Terme. It’s near Siena in Tuscany. I checked your answering service and then had a chat with Frank. He gave me your Toronto numbers.”

“I thought you’d be in Paris by now. How’s the weather?”

“Glorious. We’re pushing the season a little, but at least we’re ahead of the crowds.”

“‘We,’ who’s ‘we’? You’re not on a tour.”

“Oh, I met Andrew Moser on the plane when I was bumped up to First. He’s a mushroom grower from California. He’s been sort of looking after me.”

“Nice,” I said through my teeth.

“I’d forgotten how charming some wealthy men can be.”

“Nice. Are you seeing your fill of the galleries?”

“More than that. Andy loves food and we’ve been on a food orgy, on a high level, you understand. We’ve run down a few great spots. It’s like Bloor Street in Toronto. This place is a famous spa, although I haven’t taken more than a sample of the waters.”

“Nice. When will you leave for Paris?”

“My first lecture’s not until Monday, the twelfth, in the old place I told you about on the rue d’Ulm. Remember?”

“I miss you.”

“I’ll be home in a couple of weeks. You can tell me what you’re up to in Toronto when I see you.”

“Right. I’ll be talking to you.” Anna said goodbye, and I started wondering what that was all about. Was it an announcement of some kind? It would be a little after lunch-time in Italy. I wondered whether she’d eaten yet or whether her mushroom millionaire had left her waiting at the hotel. Maybe he was planning a late supper that evening in some out-of-the-way hilltop village. How do I know he’s a millionaire? Is this
my
day-dream or yours? I thought about the morning coffee I hadn’t had yet. Sally was at the door. It took me a moment to recross the Atlantic. I squeezed the bridge of my nose to force my concentration.

“Do you know where Vanessa’s staying right now, Sally? Since the murder, I mean.”

“If Ms. Moss wants you to know, I’m sure she’ll tell you, Mr. Cooperman. I have instructions not to tell anyone.”

“Good point,” I said, and began sifting through some pages in front of me on my desk, like I was busy at something. When I looked at them, actually focusing, I saw that they were the rundowns I’d asked for yesterday.

On top was a name and phone number: Frances Scerri. Ah, yes: Vanessa’s sister. The one she’s not on speaking terms with. I put it in my pocket. Under that I found a hierarchical chart that divided the page into several boxes. The first box on the left had
Chairman
written at the top. His name was Hampton Fisher, and he was NTC’s controlling shareholder, owning forty-two per cent of the A shares. Hampton Fisher and I had never met, but I had known his wife, Peggy O’Toole, the movie star, about ten years ago when she was making
Ice Bridge
in Niagara Falls. I got to know her fairly well, now I come to think of it, but her standoffish, germ-fearing husband so rarely came out in public he was being accused of being Howard Hughes back from the dead. He had surrounded himself with flunkies in Niagara Falls, rented a whole floor at the Colonel John Butler Hotel, and watched people’s comings and goings through a series of TV monitors. If he and Peggy had had any children, I never heard about it. Yet they stayed married, which was an improvement on Hughes. Fisher had not scrimped and saved to make his fortune, nor had he beat his way to the top pushing less dedicated entrepreneurs out of his way. He was born into a successful newspaper family. It was his grandfather who’d done all the pushing and shoving. Hamp simply inherited it all when his father died. For that reason, many tried to write off Hamp Fisher. He was easy to put down: the drinking water he had flown in from California, the thermometer he carried at all times, his peculiar diets. All this gave reporters from opposition papers a field day whenever he threatened to take over another group of dailies. To tell the truth, Fisher had weeded and trimmed his garden of papers, pruning the unproductive ones and fertilizing the promising. His grandfather would have been proud of him. More recently, having put the papers in a holding company, he had been buying up television stations and setting up the newest of our TV networks. I guess it beat collecting stamps.

Two lines had been drawn from the
Chairman
box. The top one ran to a box marked
Board of Directors
. On it, I would find that the members, friendly outsiders, plus the chairman and the president, owned another twenty-six per cent of the A shares. The names of the friendly outsiders didn’t light up my sky at once, but on a second reading I recognized the name Ted Thornhill. Hell, I’d even met him! He was the guy who made a guest appearance at the signing of the Dermot Keogh Hall contracts, the man who’d arrived with his own photographer. He was the president and general manager, the chief executive officer of the whole shebang. Not only did his name appear in a list of the Board of Directors, but it appeared just below it in a box all his own, joined by a line to the
Chairman
box. A vertical line ran down from the
President, General Manager & CEO
box to a horizontal line from which depended several boxes:
Finance, Programming, Advertising & Sales, News
. All of these were vice-presidents. Again, the names here meant nothing to me.

I tried to remember what I once knew about shares in limited corporations. The A shares were voting shares, the preferred shares held by a few insiders. The B shares were publicly traded. The insiders were allowed to own only five per cent of the B shares, according to what my paper said. That left twenty-seven per cent of the remaining B shares widely owned in small batches. I put this page away for future reference after checking to see that Vanessa’s name turned up in a box of its own directly under David L. Simbrow, the vice-president of programming. She was designated
Head of Entertainment
. Her name had been inserted where that of Nathan Green had been removed.

I called out to Sally, “What happened to Nate Green, Sally? Where did he fit into the frame of things?” Sally looked at me for a good deal longer than I thought necessary to prepare an answer.

“Mr. Green died three months ago, Mr. Cooperman. Cancer of the oesophagus. Very sad.” As soon as she’d said it, I remembered Vanessa telling me on our first official outing together. Meanwhile, Sally had gone back to her reading, once she’d passed on her news. Again I abruptly pulled her attention away from the copy of
Billboard
she was clipping.

“But Ms. Moss has been here for a year, more or less. What department was Mr. Green moved to?” I was plainly annoying Sally now, and she slapped down the paper on top of a stack of out-of-town newspapers.

“He had several titles: first he was vice-president of Arts and Entertainment for a time, switched to become a senior assistant to Mr. Thornhill, then he was made vicepresident of Arts and Sciences. That was his title at the time of his death.”

“I see. Who’s the vice-president of Arts and Sciences right now, Sally?”

“There isn’t one. I don’t expect there will be.”

“So, it was created for Green and died with him?”

“That’s one opinion, Mr. Cooperman.”

“Do you have another?”

“The charter of the National Television Corporation has always insisted that we have a mandate to keep the arts and sciences within our purview. Some think that we have been lax in this area. Having a vice-president in charge tended to defuse that criticism.”

“So, the ailing Nate Green helped quell the charge of programming for the lowest common denominator.”

“Mr. Cooperman,” she said, colouring just a little, “we program to a wide popular audience, not to the lowest common denominator.”

“You believe that?” I asked, but was destined not to get an answer, for at this moment Vanessa Moss thundered into the room banging down a full briefcase on the broadloom. Once again, she was beautifully turned out, thanks to her friend at Holt’s. This morning she wore a navy pinstripe with a white collar open at the throat and pointing down towards the sort of cleavage that should never be worn by applicants for junior positions at NTC. Boards are notoriously puritanical.

“Where the hell have you been?” There could be no mistake about who she meant.

“I could be dead and buried by now and you wouldn’t know about it until you saw the noon news. Come on, Benny. Get with the program!” I told her that I’d spent the late afternoon with Sykes and his partner, examining the scene of the crime and checking over what measures they had taken to see that no harm comes to her. “And?” she demanded.

“And, yes, the cops have taken steps. They are tailing you day and night. I might have checked in with you, but you didn’t leave me with an address or phone number. They also told me you were in Niagara Falls the day before yesterday, not Niagara-on-the-Lake. Funny how they get these things wrong, isn’t it?” She lowered her guns, and tried to smooth things over.

“I can explain about that. It was a secret meeting with the Shaw Festival artistic director. He suggested we not be seen too close to his present employers.”

“But you failed to tell me the truth, innocent as it appears to be.”

“Coffee?”

I nodded. Sally got up to go fetch. “By the way, Sally, did you get the things I asked you to get for Mr. Cooperman?”