The Cooperman Variations (2 page)

“Investigator. Private investigator. Was it really two years?”

“You see? You need to get away, see the world, forge something or other in the smithy of your soul. You’re not getting any younger. And besides, isn’t Anna going to be at some European university this year? Think about that?”

“Frank, you’re the devil whispering into my ear. Of course, I’d love to get away. I like to have fun same as the next man, but, Frank, I’ve got responsibilities.”

“Such as?”

“Such as my parents.”

“They go to Florida for three months every winter.”

“Well, who’s going to look after their house? water their plants? They wouldn’t want to trust that to a stranger.”

“Benny, your parents got back from Florida three weeks ago. Let’s keep the discussion relevant.”

“So, now I have to drop in to see them every couple of days.”

“What happens if you don’t?”

“I’ve never tried that.” Frank went to a cupboard and took out a bottle with his name on the label. He poured out two shots into the two glasses he kept for special occasions.

Frank was a sad character. He had helped me with a couple of my cases, but he remained a glum sort of Dubliner. An exile. With him came bad weather. He had known the writer Flann O’Brien in his younger days and got me reading him—which was a change from the Russians I was always nodding over.

“Frank, are you happy here?” He took a sip of the whiskey and looked out the windows.

“Benny, I’m different. I’m a hopeless case. I was a graduate student at Trinity when religious toleration was still incomplete. You see, I’ve been on the barricades, as it were, since I was in my teens.”

“Are you saying that you peaked too early?”

“Maybe I am and maybe I’m not. But I find this a peaceable place, this town. It’s like a fine, handsome head without an idea in it. And Ireland is an ugly witch of a shrunken head with ideas skyrocketing out her eyes and ears. It’s a tree full of singing birds and a nest of stinging nettles. I’m a bit of a loser, you know. But that’s not to be helped. Blame it on the steady approach of winter.”

“But, Frank, it’s April! April?” I had a sudden irrelevant thought: “What was that fiddler doing swimming in April?”

“What fiddler?”

“Dur-something Keogh. He drowned. Maybe it was down south. Florida’s a good place to drown. No. I remember now: Wally said it happened up north.”

“Dermot Keogh. Fiddler you call him? Damned fine cellist is what he was, Benny. I heard him once. God love me, that man could play!”

“Wally Skeat just wrote an anniversary piece about it.”

“That was a damned bloody shame, that was.”

“Tell me about him, Frank.”

“Stop trying to change the subject. Never mind about poor Keogh. He’s a year into eternity. It’s not much, but it’s a start. More to the point, boyo, you don’t have to worry about your parents’ house right now. They’re back from Miami.”

“I’m afraid of Ma’s unspoken disapproval, Frank. She wouldn’t say a word and the silence would kill me.” He shook his head and for a minute I said nothing.

Frank Bushmill, as everybody knew, was gay. And a great reader; an educated man in a lunch-bucket town. I used to hope that he could go off and enjoy himself with his own kind, but Frank was unique. There wasn’t anyone else quite like him. Oh, there were others of his ilk around, but Frank was either too fastidious, too shy or too cautious to get far in the local gay community. I once thought that in Grantham Frank
was
the gay community. Anyway, he blunted the edges of his lusts with Bushmills Old Bush, or any good single malt whiskey. He spent the worst of his drinking nights on the couch in his office, and appeared with dark-stained eyes the following morning. Despite this frailty, he had done battle on my behalf more than once. He had taken a few wallops on his head in my service, as he never tired of telling me. So, I mostly ignored what he called his “still small vice.”

“Benny, we are different. You and me. I’m never going to light up the sky. I don’t much care about it if I do or if I don’t. But you, you’re younger, and you’ve never been off the leash. Time to break the silver cord. You should think about that, Benny. You’ll be an old man before you know it.”

I nodded my head as though I agreed with him. In part, I
did
agree with him, but I had a stubborn streak in me that kept me tied to the places I knew best. I didn’t even enjoy reading the travel pages in the
Beacon
or the
Globe
. They made me car sick.

I didn’t give Frank Bushmill a straight answer, but I had to admit that he had planted seeds in my mind and watered them with the care of my own good mother. I pondered the idea as I wandered the chilly street and looked for a restaurant that I might blight into insolvency merely by going in and sitting down. Indeed, as Frank once said, it was an incredible power I had.

I should have seen the writing on the wall.

TWO

Another Tuesday

I don’t know where the spring went. Some of it was eaten up in following a husband who had driven off in the family car without giving his estranged wife and joint-owner of the vehicle a forwarding address. After a two-week period in which he paid for his gas and oil in cash, he soon returned to using his credit cards. And that’s how I nailed him. Bud told me—by now we were on a firstname basis—over coffee in downtown Buffalo that he’d suddenly realized he had been wasting his life in Grantham and that out there were Paris, London and Rome just waiting to be discovered. He recognized that his flight hadn’t got him very far—less than fifty minutes’ driving time from Grantham—but he said it had been Phase One of his plan. I could sympathize with the idea of flight, of getting away from it all, of escaping to one of the great places. But Buffalo?

When that was cleared away—it ended happily, by the way: she took the would-be world traveller back again—I cleaned up a few minor files, emptied the pencil sharpener, stapled down the carpet, which had been getting caught in the office door, and treated myself to summer hours. To fill the time, waiting for a challenging case to walk into the office now that the door was free to glide over the carpet, I read a lot of Tony Hillerman, Donald E. Westlake and Lawrence Block. Then I turned to William McIlvanney, the Glasgow writer, and to the titled ladies James and Rendell. Wally Skeat lent me a pile of Canadians: two Wrights, a Gordon, a Robinson and I can’t remember who else. When I finished those, I got some more. I would have felt better if somebody’s retainer was paying to support my reading habit, but beggars can’t be choosers. With my usual two fingers, I wrote a few letters to Anna Abraham, the light of my life, who was tramping over Tuscany with two of her graduate students before going on to give a series of lectures in Paris. Lucky Anna. Lucky Paris.

In short, I was bored out of my mind. Until a knock at the door bade me put
The Papers of Tony Veitch
face down on my desk. I covered the novel with some papers of my own and walked to the door to open it.

Here stood, how can I describe her? A vision of loveliness? The woman of my dreams? All the clichés rolled into this particular five-foot-six package of earthly delights. The sort of woman you hope will walk into your office one day. For a moment I felt like Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer combined. I took in her perfume, the cut of her suit, the silky legs, her dark hair and was just getting ready to go around again when I suddenly recognized her.

“Stella! My God! Stella Seco! I don’t believe it!” I was taken up short by this. The vision had become flesh. It wasn’t intimately familiar flesh, I hasten to add, but at least it was grounded to a terminal in my past. She was no longer an agreeable abstraction. It was as though the slinky model in a fashion photograph turned out to be the girl next door. Only Stella was never the girl next door.

“Hello, Benny,” she said in that voice that melted steel. “It’s been too long. How have you been?”

I didn’t answer for a minute, I just kept looking. At last I cleared my throat and found some inadequate words. “You look terrific, Stella. Come in.” She walked around me when I failed to clear the doorway.

Stella and I had been at Grantham Collegiate Institute and Vocational School together. Forget the fifteen hundred other teenagers. She was my first great love. She was the first great love of every male in the school. None of us, as far as I know, ever scored with Stella. There was a protective family watching over every step she took in her nickel loafers. Not that there was a scarcity of Stella-watchers. Truth to tell, Stella provided a lot of us with not only a richly imagined sex life, but with our chief incentive to stay in school. Where the challenge of French irregular verbs and the binomial theorem failed to ignite our attention, where the three results of the Persian Wars and the Keystone Clause in the American Constitution failed us, there was Stella walking down the aisle to take her seat. There are bankers and doctors today in this city who would have been clerks and technicians had it not been for Stella Seco’s cool gaze and liquid walk.

Of course, the girls in the school hated her, as I discovered later on. They were as envious of her looks as the rest of us were of her good marks in everything from algebra to zoology. Girlfriends understood that their pinned dates’ eternal devotion was subject to the possibility that Stella might nod in their direction. Stella was magic. Stella lit up the sky.

I remember one story of her sitting with some girlfriends in the Rec Hut, the coffee shop across from the school, when she saw a football player crossing the street. She asked who he was and then announced that he was going to take her to the next big school dance. And he did! It was typical of Stella’s sense of herself and her power, which the senior girls ascribed to the neardrunken state certain adipose tissue can induce in the male. Some girls even went so far as to suggest that, in certain areas, nature had been assisted. From where I was standing, the results were still convincing.

“I’m on my way to a meeting with the head of the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. I haven’t been in Grantham in ten years. The old place doesn’t change much, does it?” Her climb up my steep stairs added to the breathlessness in her voice. There was also a nervousness. I knew she’d get around to her reason for this reappearance in my life after an agreeable ramble. “… But this isn’t a social call, Benny,” she said at last, as though she’d been reading over my shoulder. “I’m in trouble and I need help.” I pulled the best seat in the house from its normal place and brought it around behind her. We both sat down, but for Stella the act of sitting was a symphony for the eyes—my politically incorrect, unreconstructed eyes, anyway.

“Trouble,” I repeated. “Tell me. Tell me all about it.”

“First of all, I’m not Stella Seco any more. I’ve been Vanessa Moss for nearly fifteen years.”

“I’ve heard that name somewhere. Recently.”

“I married Paul Moss—”

“The disc jockey from the radio station! Deep voice, like roasted velvet. Yeah, I remember him.”

“I was eighteen, Benny. I was on my own again when I was twenty.” I nodded to show that I was keeping up with her. She rooted around in her bag for the cigarettes that, judging by her expression, she had recently given up. She found a candy mint, held it for a moment, then flung it back into her bag. I could sympathize with that. I had never discovered anything to replace my habit either.

“Life with Paul was very complex, even after I quit school. He taught me a lot about broadcasting, but in the end I couldn’t hack it. Paul, I mean. Poppa made him give me an annulment. I did a catch-up year in Hamilton, then did a three-year B.A. in Toronto. You quit school too, didn’t you, Benny?”

“I managed to hold on until I graduated. They didn’t have to burn the place down to get me out after all. We missed you when you left, Stella. It was as if all the lights went from one hundred watts to forty. Did you know you had that effect on us?”

“Benny, that was
years
ago. And how can I answer that anyway? I know I have a certain effect on people, but I haven’t worked it out to a science. I always knew I was a good-looking broad. The rest was—well …”

“Why ‘Vanessa’? How did you get to ‘Vanessa’ from ‘Stella’?”

“That was the doing of one of my mentors. I’ve had a few of those. He said it had something to do with Jonathan Swift. I’ve been climbing the rickety ladder called broadcasting, Benny. I’ve already met all of the people I’m going to run into on my way down. But at the moment, I’m sitting pretty, except for … Let me finish what I came to say, Benny. We can talk about the old days later.”

“Sure, Stella. I want to hear what you have to say.”

“Since June last year I’ve been the Entertainment head at the National Television Corporation. I knew when I took the job that it wasn’t going to be easy, but I didn’t expect that they would be literally gunning for me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Renata Sartori was an old friend of mine.”

“Have I heard that name too, somewhere?”

“If you tune in on our channel. I used to live with her when I first came to Toronto. Two weeks ago, she was staying at my place. I was away. She was alone, wearing one of my dressing gowns. She answered the door and somebody shot her in the face with a shotgun. Both barrels.”

“Jesus!
That’s
where I heard your name: on the news.”

“For a week, the cops thought that I was the corpse.
Me!
You can’t blame them, really. It was my house, my dressing gown and Renata’s face …” Stella winced, shutting her eyes for a moment.

“You can skip that part.”

“The press outdid themselves:
ENTERTAINMENT HEAD BLOWN AWAY
!
NETWORK CHIEF BLASTED
! That kind of thing. When I came back into town—I was away at my place on Lake Muskoka—I walked right into the investigation. Even the cops thought I was a ghost.”

“It’s like
Laura!”
I said. “You know, the book and the movie?”

“I know, I know. Now I know what it’s like to be Gene Tierney. It was a Preminger film; 1944 or ’5.”

“The heavy was—”