The Cooperman Variations (20 page)

“Why are you sticking your nose into this?” I caught my breath.

“Vanessa says she was up here when Renata Sartori was killed. I just had to see that what she said was true. Frankly, I haven’t found her all that truthful in other things.”

“Takes after her father. Always tellin’ fish stories.”

“Was it a fish story when she said she was at her place on Monday the fifteenth of May?”

“Oh, she was here all right. Took a briefcase in with her and some bread and cheese. Frozen dinners. She never could look out for herself proper like.”

A second chance for a question of my own finally came when we were both holding Cokes from the big cooler on his dock.

“Who’s Ed?” I asked.

“Ed? Which Ed do you mean?”

“I mean the one you thought of first. The Ed that gave his keys to Vanessa for safekeeping.”

“Oh,
that’
d be old Ed Patel. Lawyer from town. His place is at the end of the path that the road peters out into.” Here he indicated a direction with his right hand, vaguely in the direction of the parking lot, which was the official end to this spur of the highway.

“Why would Ed Patel give his keys to her?”

“What are friends for? Ed was like an uncle to Stella while she was growing up.” He smiled to himself at the picture in his mind. Then his face darkened. “Ed’s been in and out of hospital for the last year. He’s in a bad way. Vanessa told him she’d see to his place.”

“She doesn’t take the time to see to her own place. How is she going to look after his?”

“You don’t miss much, for a …”

“She hasn’t had her boat out this year yet. There’s not much in the cupboards.”

“Don’t I know it. Oh, she came with a few groceries when she was up a few weeks ago, even bought bread, cheese and juice from the marina like I told you, but she didn’t bring any of the basics, you know, flour, soda, sugar, onions, potatoes. Just frozen stuff and a few boxes of Kraft Dinner was all she carried with her. She usually treats herself better than that.”

“So, you’ve been looking after Ed Patel’s place as well as hers?”

“Had to be done. A place can go to wrack and ruin in short order here at the lake. If I hadn’t kept the roofs of both places cleared of snow last winter, by now there’d be nothing you could salvage from either place. Ed found this place for Mrs. Moss and acted as her lawyer for the conveyancing. He’s got an office in town.”

“Which town would that be? Port Carling? Bracebridge? Gravenhurst?”

“Ha! Funny you said that. Ed used to keep offices in all three, but he’s closed the ones in Port Carling and Gravenhurst. Even the one in Bracebridge’s closed most times I go by. Now that Alma’s gone.”

“Who?”

“Secretary.”

“Oh. He’s that sick, is he?”

“You don’t go home again when you’re as sick as Ed is. I go see him once a week. We play cribbage. You know.”

“Hard?”

“Oh, he’s game. Yes, he’s game, but failing. Nothing left but the spirit holding him together.”

“Bracebridge hospital?”

“N’yup. Good little hospital. Had my gallstones out there. Dr. MacGruder.”

“Vanessa says there are other NTC people, you know, television people, up here on this part of the lake.” Then I remembered something. “There was a block of property. I forget the name, but the estate sold cottages on this lake to NTC people.”

“You’re talkin’ about the trust Ernie Bradings set up. Aye, Ernie let in the TV people with a vengeance. We got all sorts. Most of them bought their places. Others have long leases. Some don’t know the sharp end of a boat from the round end. Some do. Fellow named Trebitsch has three boats and he keeps them in good condition. Has cellphones in ’em. He tells me he’s an important man in Toronto. Says he’s a
newsman
. I guess he is; I see his picture in the paper. But I don’t hold much stock in getting your picture in the paper. I think if you set your mind to it, it can’t be too difficult. Think Mr. Trebitsch learned about watercraft from Dermot Keogh, the cellist. Dermot’s boats were always well kept. Bob Foley knows his engines. But those friends of his, like that Mr. Devlin and Mr. Rankin, they’re worse than both the Faulkner boys put together.”

“How did Devlin get a Bradings Trust property? He’s a lawyer, not a TV person.”

“His father bought a place not too far from here after the war. No connection with Bradings, except when they went fishing together. Should be a law who can run a boat. The way I see it, the lake’s the same as the highway. You obey the rules or the Provincial Police’ll run you in. That’s funny about Mr. Devlin too, because I heard from Dermot that he’s a keen sailor. Has a yacht down in the city. I wouldn’t have guessed it. For a time there, Mr. Devlin was ruining a motor every time he came up to visit Dermot. But then—that Dermot Keogh was a smart feller—he cut Mr. Devlin off. Wouldn’t have him at his place any more. Didn’t much like Rankin either there for a time.”

“When would that have been, Mr. Evans? Dermot Keogh died a year ago last April. When did Devlin and Rankin become scarce around the lake?”

“Well, let me see …” Ifor pulled at his chin a minute to see if he could get his dates and tourists straight. “It would have been in the late spring of the year before last. Around June, I’d say. Didn’t see Mr. Devlin or Mr. Rankin on the lake after that.” He thought a minute as though checking on his facts a second time. Then he shook his head: “Mr. Devlin never did know how to dress up here. I think he’s the only man been up here wearing a three-piece suit since Mr. Eaton died.” Ifor Evans was not given to laughing at his betters, but he came close as that vision flashed through his head.

After that, he seemed to tire of giving away so much information. He leaned into me with a few questions, which I tried to answer as honestly as I could. He knew about the murder of Renata Sartori, and seemed to accept the theory that Renata had been killed by mistake, that Vanessa had been the intended target. “She was a very nice woman, that Renata Sartori. She loved it on the lake when Dermot drove her up for a weekend. Mr. Keogh told me he might just marry that girl. That’s what he told me sitting right where you’re sitting. ‘I could do worse,’ he said. ‘I could do a great deal worse.’ Pity about that woman. She wasn’t very old, was she?”

A few minutes of this went by, with the professional questioner answering all of the questions, and the amateur resting his hands at the back of his head. At last, I placed my empty pop can in the barrel designated for bottles and cans and took my leave, jiggling the keys to Ed Patel’s place in my pocket as I headed up the trail a piece.

THIRTEEN

The road I followed from the parking lot was less than a road but more than a path. You could call it a lane. The trees arching down around me from above were very lane-like, and the twin ruts that made their parallel way through the bush were rather road-like, but the bumps, roots and outcroppings of rocky Precambrian Shield made it hard to imagine anything not on tank tracks making its way up and down this stretch of whatever it was. The birds didn’t seem to mind it. Animals kept me company, just beyond my actually seeing them. I could hear them all right, off in the bracken or among the trees, and the sounds were scaled small enough so that only once or twice did I think I might be in trouble from a man-eating chipmunk or a rogue rabbit.

The trail led through a grove of dense white pine. It must have been second growth, but it looked substantial, even commercial. My path ended, to my complete surprise, at the back end of a beautiful, dark blue, antique Bentley. I nearly fell down and worshipped. It was sheltered under a rustic lean-to with a covering that was half canvas and half blue plastic. I would have been less surprised to have found a sleigh and eight tiny reindeer. But, on reflection, I thought I
a
m less than a few hundred metres, as the trout swims, from Millionaires’ Row. I shouldn’t be surprised at anything seen in these latitudes.

The cottage, painted a forest green, lay just beyond the lean-to. Like Vanessa’s, it was screened in along three sides, which tended to show the varmints out there who was boss. The key I’d taken from Vanessa’s kitchen turned smoothly in the Yale lock, and I found myself in a brand new way to define what a Muskoka cottage ought to be. There were only four rooms, two of them bedrooms. The kitchen, a dark, gloomy hole, had been added as an afterthought, but it had made up for that in being used to capacity. There were signs of years of cooking at high temperatures. Under the counter I found gadgets for storing pot lids and drying tea-towels. Out a rear door, I found large cooking pans that had been placed outside possibly for the wildlife. I could imagine that a family of raccoons licked many a platter clean of congealed or carbonized fat and grease.

The biggest room was a comfortable one, filled with wicker easy chairs, couches and low rattan tables. The small shelf of books was dedicated to old law reports and to ancient novels of the Book of the Month Club, featuring
Forever Amber, Leave Her to Heaven
and
The Sun Is My Undoing
. A couple of philosophical volumes such as
Meetings with Remarkable Men
, by G.I. Gurdjieff. There were a few others, more modest in size, written in Hindi or Urdu, featuring blue-faced ladies serving platters of sweetmeats to lounging young men wearing robes of office or of pleasure. The focus of the room was a fieldstone fireplace of monumental proportions. The large opening was buttressed by a pair of massive andirons. The ashes from the most recent fire were cold; the remaining scrap of newspaper that I found bore no date. So much for detection, I thought. And what was I doing here anyway? Ed Patel wasn’t a suspect. Did I still hope to find a gas receipt with Vanessa’s signature on it? And why here? Just because Vanessa had keys to the house? Patel’s name had come up too often and from too many directions for me to ignore it without losing sleep. Vanessa knew him. Jesse, the technician, said that Foley knew him. One likes to be thorough, I muttered through clenched teeth.

I stood up and heard the snap of my knees. A familiar voice whispered his familiar refrain in my inner ear all about age and futility. This fireplace was as free of clues as Vanessa’s across the lake. I cursed the fireplace silently as I steadied myself on the rough wooden floor. But then I smiled. My powers were more acute than I realized: above the fireplace hung an old gun. It was a shotgun of some kind. Twelve gauge, I thought. At that point I felt an itch at the back of my knees that has been in the past, if not infallible, at least a fair guide to what was going on. I was suspicious enough to look for something that might not smudge fingerprints if there were any. A plastic shopping bag served the purpose very well. I took the gun off the wall, keeping the plastic between me and the gun. A dog owner would recognize it as a variation on pooping and scooping. I smelled the twin barrels. They smelled like the barrels of a shotgun. I couldn’t tell whether it had just been fired or if it fired the last shot in the First World War. Certainly, it looked old enough to have been fired in that war, if shotguns weren’t banned by international agreement.

Since I needed a bigger plastic bag than the one I’d first hit upon, I looked into a low cupboard to the right of the fireplace. In addition to a big Mountain Co-op bag, I discovered an old cardboard box containing eight live shells for the gun. It had originally held twice that many. I slipped the gun into the larger bag, and slipped the box of shells into the one I’d been using instead of rubber gloves. As I brandished these trophies, I thought, These might earn me some slack with the Toronto cops. They couldn’t throw me out on my ear if I handed them the murder weapon, now, could they? Of course, maybe Muskoka cottages abound in displayed firearms. I don’t know. I’d have to wait to see whether their eyes lit up when the tests came back from the Forensic Centre.

Beyond the gun, I didn’t find much of interest in Ed Patel’s cottage. I saw where he kept his car keys. I found another set with the name Dermot Keogh on a piece of cardboard attached by a string. What were they doing there? I wondered, as I wandered from one of the bedrooms into the other. Patel was a lawyer before he took sick, wasn’t he? I tried to remember. Offices in three towns to begin with, now dwindled down to one. I decided that I might remember better if I stretched out on one of the beds and closed my eyes for ten minutes. I did that. Then I kept them closed for another twenty minutes, and awakened with a start when a clock in the big room went off, sounding the hour, which was just four o’clock when I checked it with my watch.

I felt better for the nap and closed up the cottage, taking my pieces of evidence with me through the bush back along the path to the marina parking lot and my car. Ifor Evans wouldn’t hear of my paying him for the use of the canoe, and I left the marina promising to see him again before the summer was over. Driving back to the lodge, I decided on a detour to Bracebridge to buy a bathing suit. I had been moving around this planet without one for several years and I thought it was time to end that situation. The huge shopping malls on the highway going into Bracebridge swelled with promise under the afternoon sun. My greed for camping stoves, jackknives, sleeping bags and tents was tested by the reality that these delightful objects were all too readily at hand. I only hoped the stores contained the solution to my more modest request, a bathing suit in my size.

The parking lots on both sides of the road were nearly full. Business was good for Canadian Tire, the beer and liquor stores and the supermarket. I found a pair of black trunks, paid for them and wandered out on the steaming asphalt grinning to myself. I liked swimming, but I hardly ever made the opportunity.

“Pistachio!”

“Huh?” I looked in the direction of the voice. A pretty woman was walking towards me. Her smile opened out and overwhelmed me. There’s only one person who calls me that.

“Pistachio! Don’t you
remember
me?” My mind was still churning, trying to fit the memory into the right channel. By now she was stopping in front of me, blonde and, well, beautiful. In a moment, the smile would begin to lose its lustre if I didn’t show signs of recognition. She took off the large sunglasses so I could see her eyes.