by Howard Engel
I could feel Newby’s eyes on me, sizing me up. I was intimidated into not looking him over until he had finished with me. Meanwhile he was full of forgettable chatter about the club, the weather and the difficulty of finding really first-rate restaurants in town. I was tempted to recommend Diana Sweets, where I usually have a sandwich every day or so, but I kept my mouth shut. If he was feeling awkward, to hell with giving him his out card.
When menus came, Newby recommended the fish. So we both had that. The waiter removed the bones with theatrical aplomb and served the fish along with some under-cooked vegetables which had never done any time in a can. I could see that Newby was having a hard time holding off telling me why he’d called. I made a side-bet with myself that he wouldn’t last until dessert. I was wrong, even though I’d let my silences grow to the breaking-point several times. Finally the table was cleared and coffee was served.
“Mr. Cooperman,” he began, replacing his cup on its saucer without making a sound, “I am told that you are particularly skilled in all branches of surveillance work. Is that so?”
“I used to have a big practice in divorce work. You know as well as I do that the bottom fell out of that a few years ago. At that time, most of—”
“Yes, I understand. Would you be available to do a piece of work for me?”
“Beginning?”
“At once. I thought I’d made myself clear. I’m sorry. Yes, I need someone who would be able to devote a good deal of time to recording the movements of someone.”
“Local?”
“Yes. At present. But she may leave town. I would want you to follow her wherever she goes.”
“This could run into money.” Newby waved his hand grandly the way people do who never have to spend their own.
“I should tell you that I don’t keep a lot of fancy equipment on hand. I rent what I need. Saves overhead.”
“Are you interested?”
“You know that I don’t have a large agency. It’s me, myself and I. Some outfits can let you have relays in three shifts. As long as you know that.”
“You’re the man I’m looking for. You come most highly recommended.” He allowed a smile to show a double row of white teeth. I smiled back at him and he held out his hand over the coffee cups. “It’s settled then. Stan Mendlesham will be in touch with you about setting up a reporting system and will handle the money end.” Newby took a dark notebook from his inside breast pocket and tore out a blue-lined page.
“Right now, I’m more interested in hearing the name of the woman you want followed,” I said.
“Woman? Did I say woman?” His eyes opened wide and his Montblanc paused above the sheet of paper.
“Your pronouns gave me a hint. Do you want to let me know any more about her, or do you want that to be part of my task?”
“I like a man with a sense of humour, Mr. Cooperman. I wish I had more time to spend with you.” As we talked, Newby was writing down details of how I might get hold of Stan Mendlesham at all hours of the day and night. Then he looked up and handed me the paper. “The woman I’m interested in is Catherine Bracken. Have you heard of her?”
“She reads the news at ten on TV? Sure, I know her to see her. Who around town doesn’t?”
“Certain interests I represent—you don’t mind if I don’t go into detail about this?—would like to know where Miss Bracken spends her time when she is not at the television station. Would you be able to discover some of the answers to this by, let’s see, next week at this time?”
“I do have contacts at the station. Sure, I think I would be able to sketch in the broad outlines by then.” Newby looked pleased and almost grinned across at me. Meanwhile, I was secretly calculating that if my contacts were in good repair, I might know the answers in a couple of hours.
“Naturally, Mr. Cooperman,” he said looking me in the eye while he carelessly initialled the check, “I would appreciate the utmost discretion on your part. We must protect our clients. You must protect me and I have my own client, who expects nothing less than total confidentiality.”
“It’s my policy to keep buttoned up, Mr. Newby. It’s the only way to stay in business.”
“Exactly! Good!” he said as he pushed the table away from him and got to his feet. I struggled upright as well as I could with the table pushed into my stomach.
“You’re not a member here, I don’t suppose, are you Mr. Cooperman?” he said, leading the way back to the front hall.
“No, I’m rather lax about keeping my memberships in order. I don’t read Punch regularly.”
“Not published any more. Didn’t think I’d seen you around,” he said and turned to concentrate on slipping into his toe-hugging rubbers and overcoat. “My son, Gerard, who has just come into the firm, wouldn’t consider membership here. Thinks we’re too old fashioned I expect. Probably felt the same thing when I was his age.”
We shook hands at the front door. Newby seemed to enjoy shaking hands. He said goodbye to me on the sidewalk, assuming that we were walking in opposite directions.
“When I have the information,” I said, “I’ll leave word with your secretary.” Newby frowned and shook his head.
“Best to deal with Mendlesham,” he said. “Keep him in the picture.” I felt like an idiot. He’d already told me to work through Mendlesham. Ma was right: I’m not to be trusted with serious matters.
Newby turned away from me and began making his way towards St. Andrew Street, the direction I was about to go myself. But he’d taken possession of the middle of the sidewalk with such authority that I decided not to challenge him for my share in front of his own club. After all, he’d left me with the remaining three cardinal points of the compass to choose from. I could be big and let Newby have one.
SIX
Robin O’Neil was wearing a shocking-pink turtleneck and rust-coloured corduroy trousers when he came out into the lobby of CXAN in response to my call from the front desk. There was a time when I had the run of the TV station, when we were rehearsing a play in the downstairs room, but the receptionists who knew me were gone and the redecorated lobby looked strange.
“Benny! So good to see you! What happy wind? Don’t you just hate this weather?” Robin was one of the two people in town who put on plays. The other, Ned Evans, was his sworn enemy.
“You didn’t see our Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Benny. I looked for you to no avail!”
“I was out of town all three nights, Robin. I heard it was very well done.”
“A triumph! That’s what it was. Nothing less. We had Anna Logue from the Beacon to review it and she gave us a rave!”
“Robin, I wonder if you can tell me about the shifts you work here at the station. I’ve got a young cousin interested in the field and I said I’d find out a few things.”
“Send him along, dear boy! I’ll tell him all I know. Pass on the torch and all that sort of thing.”
“She’d be glad to learn the basics from you. I’ll tell her to drop around.” Robin’s face fell at the pronouns.
“Well, you can give her the basic gen, Benny. Let her telephone me if she has any questions. One thing, tell her it’s no bed of roses. The pay is terrible in the beginning and the hours are killing. I sometimes work around the clock just to keep the station on the air.”
“Would things be tamer than that for a news reader?” Robin let his mouth slide into an unpleasant smile.
“Oh, she wants to be on camera, does she? Wants to be the face of the ten o’clock news?”
“She’s a regular Catherine Bracken,” I said. “How much real reporting would Catherine Bracken get into in a week? Or is it all reading what’s been written for her?”
“I’m more Catherine Bracken than she is. I write most of her stuff.”
“So, she just reads what you give her?” Robin let his eyes roll up towards the ceiling.
“Oh, she sometimes gets a bee in her little bonnet. She comes to me with notions she thinks are newsworthy. I tell her t
o concentrate on pronouncing the Russian names correctly.”
“She’d work an eight-hour day?” I asked.
“Bracken? Eight hours? Are you kidding?” I let my face show that I was ready to be shocked. “She wanders in here in time to do the dinner-time news and she’s out of here before we sign off. She’s finished by half-past ten. How long does it take to remove her make-up? I ask you?”
“Does she have a journalism degree? Did she ever work for a paper?”
“Look, Benny, I don’t want to give your cousin a false idea of the realities around here.”
“What do you mean?”
“The way to the top in broadcasting, Benny, doesn’t lie through the groves of Academe.”
“Are you saying she will need to have influence?”
“I’m saying she’s got to have more than looks and brains. She’s got to know how to make the most of what she’s got.”
“Not to put it crudely,” I said.
“Hell, Benny, she’s your cousin! I’m just reading the writing on the wall.”
“Who’s the main talent scout at CXAN?”
“Try Orv Wishart. Station manager and son-in-law of the owner.”
“I thought CXAN was a company?”
“It is and the company is the Ravenswood family, as in the Ravenswood Bridge, Ravenswood Park, Ravenswood Art Gallery and Ravenswood Publishing and Broadcasting Company, the good old RPBC.”
The mention of the name Ravenswood—a name that seems to come out of a novel—set my mind going back over the associations it began rattling in my head. Ever since I could read, I’d seen the name printed in bold-face type under the reduced logo of the Beacon at the top of the editorial page. When the issues were serious enough, the name Harlan Ravenswood appeared at the bottom of an editorial. Once, on the front page. More recently, the Ravenswood name was kept out of the paper. I used to think it was reverse snobbery: let the parvenus try to get their names into the social notes; those who had arrived kept their doings to themselves. Still, I knew who they were. Old Harlan had been dead now for many years, but I remember seeing his tall white-headed figure crossing St. Andrew Street, waving to friends, like a politician with an election coming up. I’d once stood beside him in a crowd lined up to watch a parade. I can’t remember the occasion, except that there were tears in his eyes when he turned away and the crowd began to disperse.
I first saw his widow, Gladys, in this lobby. We’d been rehearsing a play in the basement of the TV building on Oak Hill, and she came in wearing a rose coat that covered her down to the ankles. She was weaving and staggering as she nearly bumped into me at the top of the stairs from the rehearsal hall. In that light, her skin reminded me of an orchid. Her hair was tightly permed under a fur hat.
“What are you doing here, young man?”
“I’m with the group rehearsing downstairs,” I said. I hoped that it wouldn’t be necessary for me to explain that I had come upstairs with a bursting bladder. I got away as fast as I could, but not before seeing that her eyes were dark and unfocused. She was still there, sitting on the staircase when I came out of the washroom a few minutes later. I told Ned Evans about her, and he had someone drive Gladys home to the big house on Hillcrest Avenue.
“I once saw the old man at a parade,” I said to Robin at last.
“They went in for parades, fox hunts and march-pasts when he was alive. They had an in with the Royal Family through their horses and dogs.”
“I know a guy who owns one-twenty-fifth of a race horse.”
“Nowadays the old woman only cares about the paper and the TV and radio stations. They say she watches Orv like a cat, but she thinks her son-in-law pisses pure lemonade. She wouldn’t believe the out-of-town papers when he was arrested for hit-and-run five years ago in Toronto. Not a word in the Beacon about it. No, dear boy, Mrs. Harlan Ravenswood believes she is living a never-ending romance and the current star is her daughter’s husband, Orv Wishart, the son of a bitch!”
“What does the daughter have to say?” I recalled her interest in reclaiming drunks at the Nag’s Head.
“Antonia doesn’t give a damn. She’s been on to Orv from the beginning. I think he tried to sell her bridal train on the way down the nave of St. George’s. Antonia’s got her head screwed on right. I’m not worried about her.” Here Robin grabbed me by the arm and turned me so that I was facing the sweeping end of the staircase as it came into the main reception area of the converted old mansion. A heavily built man in shirtsleeves was just coming to the bottom.
“Speak of the devil,” Robin said in my ear, in a voice that was heavy with playfulness. “He gets all his exercise on those stairs; never uses the phone.”
“Robin,” Wishart shouted when he caught sight of us, “what are we feeding CBC radio newsroom at 6:45?” He looked like a confused man trying to come to grips with a sudden accumulation of paper that grew on his desk over the lunch-hour.
“That’ll be the Governor Simcoe item that Frank did: you know a commemoration of the first governor’s search for a capital. He went all the way to Detroit.”
“What the hell are they going to do with it? It happened two hundred years ago.”
“They’re very big on history right now, Orv. Maybe it has to do with Christmas?” Orv came up to us and Robin introduced me. It was probably good for my ego to see that he was only half-focused on me as he gave the small bones in my right hand a massage. In fact, as it soon became apparent, he was looking over my shoulder to where Catherine Bracken stood, pulling off her snowboots. We all turned to see better. Orv immediately set off in her direction. Robin slipped me a wink, before following him. Together they got rid of the woman’s camelhair coat and hung it on a rack. She walked around to the vacant chair of the receptionist and checked her cubbyhole for messages. She let put a loud, rather dramatic sigh as she flipped through the pink slips of paper. Bracken was smaller than I’d imagined from her appearance on the tube. I put her at about five-three or four and just over one hundred pounds. Orv came around to her side of the counter and tried to engage her in conversation. It was plain that she wasn’t in the market for any, because in less than ten seconds, she had moved past him and was heading down the long corridor to the back of the building where the television offices were located. Robin and I watched her until Orv’s body cut off the view as he followed her. Robin shook his head. “Sometimes, Benny, I think that man knows no fear.”
“How do you mean?”
“The old lady could walk in at any time. Or Antonia for that matter.” He made a noise with his tongue on the back of his front teeth to express displeasure.
“Has he been giving Bracken a hard time? Is he harassing her?”
“Well, neither of them is talking. But she is reading the news and saying the names wrong night after night. What do you think?”
“That’s arguing ass-backwards, Robin. That’s only a possible cause of her getting the job. There could be others.” Robin’s look at me was really aimed at an invisible observer of the scene. It was designed to make me feel unworldly even for Grantham, Ontario.
“Are you suggesting, Benny, that Cath got the job because Larry Hendrick went to the CBC at short notice? Come on!”
“Robin, you sure are giving me a lot of names. Are any of them going to be of any use? That’s the question I’m asking myself.”
“And what are you answering yourself? You think your cousin has the guts to run and play in this minefield?”
“What cousin? Oh, that cousin! Sure, she knows what it’s all about.”
At that moment, Catherine Bracken came back into the reception area and picked up the Beacon from the receptionist’s desk. It was four-thirty. If she was working until ten-thirty under the bright lights, I thought she was earning her money. Robin grinned at me as Catherine Bracken quickly ran through the paper, accompanying her noisy page-turning with comments that were not at all flattering to her colleagues at the Beacon. I began buttoning up my coat. The last thing I wanted
was a well-intentioned introduction from Robin. A word from him and I’d have to come up with the fictional cousin I’d been talking about.
On the way towards the entrance, Robin nodded back over his shoulder at Catherine Bracken. “Not bad in the flesh, is she? Orv sure can pick ’em.” I wanted to turn around and confirm what Robin was saying, but I didn’t want to make myself conspicuous. I had seen enough of her as she came in and went to work to realize that this was an attractive, well-put-together young woman. I could see that there were aspects to this assignment that I was not going to find hard to swallow at all.
SEVEN
Explaining my sudden interest in the queen of the CXAN news room to Anna Abraham was more difficult than I thought it was going to be. I tried to pass it off as just another job, but Anna was quick to see that there was a tiny Orv Wishart concealed in a corner of my heart. I told her over dinner at Lije Swift’s place in St. David’s. I wanted to show Lije that I sometimes ate before two in the morning and in the company of civilized people as well as policemen of my acquaintance. Anna’s reaction was to show no curiosity about the client or the job. She was usually ready to join in as my favourite silent partner, but not that night. Was it something about me that had changed or was it something that Catherine Bracken did to other women. I don’t know. All I know is that the duck seemed overdone and greasy, the wine sour and the dessert oversweet.
“What’s going on up the hill at Secord?” I asked, trying to locate neutral territory Anna taught a few sections of history at the university.
“Exams, papers to grade. The usual grind,” she said. It was an answer, but it lacked the Anna Abraham touch. We sat in silence for a few minutes longer.
“Are you looking forward to the holidays?” She removed a piece of peach stone and placed it on the side of her plate. By way of answer to my question, she shrugged.
“Come on, Anna! I didn’t ask for this job!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.
“You would be talking to me if l’d been asked to track down a painting for your father.”
