The Cooperman Variations

by Howard Engel

  The thought that Vanessa had been dumped opened a leak in my system. I could feel myself deflating like a party balloon that has been lost behind some furniture. I hadn’t realized the extent of my partiality for Vanessa’s empire. Maybe last Thursday night meant more to me than I suspected. In spite of the obvious ways in which I’d seen her manipulate people, ways that seemed crude as well as self-serving, I’d been pulled in with the other suckers. I was a consumer of Vanessa’s magnetism, and I hadn’t suspected it until that moment.

  Suddenly she was there. With Trebitsch, Rankin and Thornhill. She was radiant; Ken Trebitsch was glum. Like he’d been run over by a campaign bus. Even the three flunkies he travelled the corridors with were glum. Stella had beaten them! Rankin sputtered like a beached flounder. Thornhill looked confused. His little eyes strained to find focus. No wonder: he couldn’t figure out what had just happened to him. I wouldn’t hear the details until later, but their faces couldn’t have told me more.

  “Thank you, Ted. I appreciate your help on this. Good morning, Mr. Cooperman. So nice of you to drop by.”

  Her face was tanned, and Armani was keeping his side of the bargain. She looked younger, more poised and healthier than when I last saw her only four days ago. Thornhill and Trebitsch shook my hand without emotion when Vanessa reintroduced us, then headed off in other directions, neither daring to speak to the other as they went. She was secure enough of her position to wave the visitors on their way, as though it was she who’d called the meeting. After they’d gone, she collected some message slips from Sally on her way back into her private office.

  “Benny,” Sally said, breaking in on my sudden infatuation with my client’s presence, even in her absence. “Here’s a copy of that will you were asking about.” I must have had a stupid look on my face as I stared at the closed door to Vanessa’s private office, because Sally repeated what she’d just said. I said some calming words to myself and cleared my throat.

  “Thanks, Sally, I won’t keep it long.” I retreated to an unoccupied corner and sat in the mock shade of one of those indoor trees with trunks that look as if they’ve been woven from the trunks of three or four smaller trees. The leaves were narrow and pointed and didn’t really give any shade. The lighting in the office banished shadows of all kinds. I sat down on the edge of the window ledge.

  The will was long and complicated. It had been drawn up by Raymond Devlin on the kind of paper that is made from royal bedsheets. After a number of small bequests, including the gift of his cello to the University of Toronto’s Hart House collection of stringed instruments, the bulk of the estate was divided among several trusts. There were sections on the setting up of the Plevna Foundation. Both Bob Foley and Philip Rankin were named to it. Its direction and the direction of the rest of the will were left in the capable hands of the sole executor, Raymond Devlin. The will was dated March second, three years ago. It was witnessed by two women, whose names appeared again with affidavits that they had indeed witnessed the signing of the will I was holding. I looked at the scrawled signature of Dermot Keogh in all the places where his signature was supposed to appear. The bottom of each page was initialled. It looked as legal as hell. I couldn’t argue with it. But, there was nothing about a palliative care unit on any of its fifteen pages. Nor had he disposed of his collection of motorcycles. That left me something to chew on.

  It was nearly five when Vanessa finally sent for me. She was seated behind her desk, but got up and walked around the desk to greet me with a double bussing until my cheeks shone with gratitude and pleasure. “Benny, you know, I often thought of you during the weekend. You mustn’t let it go to your head, but you were missed.” She sat on one of the couches that flanked a glass-topped coffee table and indicated that I was to join her. I did. “Now, tell me what you’ve been doing while I was on the coast.”

  I gave a fair rendering of my activities as far as seemed best. I held back a few things that I thought she shouldn’t know about just then. I didn’t want to hamper my own investigation by having too many people know as much as I did.

  “You’ve been busy,” she acknowledged.

  “So have you, Vanessa. I’m all admiration.”

  “I was playing dirty pool in L.A., Benny. I got Warners and the others to sign contracts with a clause that lets them off the hook if I’m suddenly no longer head of Entertainment. They didn’t like it, but they could see that that would give them the power to go on dealing with me for a while. Nobody down there wants to break in a new head right now.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “They signed it, so it’s legal. Irregular but solid enough to put them off trying to break it.”

  “What’s next?”

  “I need to clean off this desk. It’ll take me a few minutes.”

  “So, you don’t need me for the next half-hour?”

  “Benny, I’m Vanessa Moss, and I don’t need anyone. I survived a coup right here in this office ten minutes ago, and I was terrific! You should have seen me! Oh, Benny, I was good!”

  “That translates as follows: you can spare me for thirty minutes. I read you. Over and out.”

  “Cooperman, you have a leaden soul. It will never rise. Scram. But I want your trim ass back here in an hour. Then we’ll celebrate.”

  I wasn’t sure where I was going, but where I ended up was the Rex pub around the corner on Queen Street. I didn’t know whether the blaring TV would help me think or not, but the idea of a cold glass of beer had been growing within me, and I was happy to see its reality being set down at a table in front of me. Before I’d finished the first cool draft, there was a hand on my shoulder. It belonged to Jesse Alder, the technician I’d met the other day.

  “You want to join us? There’s a gang of us at our regular table in the back. You’re welcome any time, Mr. Cooperman.”

  “Thanks, Jesse, I’d like that. But first, I want to talk to you for a minute. You mind?”

  “No, go ahead. I’m on break. My time is your time.” Jesse sat down facing me.

  “The other day when I was here with you, I asked about Bob Foley. You know that I’m a private investigator and that I’m trying to keep Vanessa Moss from getting killed the way Renata Sartori was.”

  “Sure. I know. Everybody knows.”

  “What I wanted to ask you is why did everybody at the table dummy up when I brought up Foley’s name?”

  “He has never been popular with the guys, Benny.”

  “I guessed that much. And his sudden rise under the banner of Dermot Keogh didn’t add to his popularity, did it? But there’s something else. I feel it itching the backs of my knees. My knees tell me when I’m close to something. Never fails.”

  “Just a minute.” Jesse got up, revisited his table long enough to retrieve a glass of beer and return in less than twenty seconds. He took a long drink before he spoke. “Look, before Bob Foley came along, I did all the gofering for Dermot. We were friends over at the CBC long before Bob got out of Ryerson with his Radio and TV Arts degree. I’m talking about the ten years before I introduced Dermot to Bob four years ago. I mastered all of the recordings he made in Toronto except for maybe half a dozen that Bob did. I liked Dermot a lot, but I couldn’t go at his pace any more. Nobody could. And my back was giving me trouble. So I introduced him to Bob, who is really a good technician. He’s got a good ear and he’s learned to read music. The boys know this, and they think it’s unfair that Bob should have figured so big in Dermot’s will, and I got left out altogether.”

  “I could make a good case for your being an aggrieved character. If Dermot was murdered, you’d stand high among the suspects.”

  “Me! Look, Benny. You don’t understand how it was. I was Dermot’s friend. I mean, he told me about his life: his time with Casals in Prades, his classes with Rostropovich in Moscow, his tiff with Von Karajan. All that stuff. But even more important, I got to do that work— before, I mean. I recorded him, did all the editing and mastering. Nobody, not Bob, not Rankin, not
even Dermot Keogh himself can take that away from me.”

  “I hear what you’re saying.”

  “I did the work. You couldn’t buy that from me. So not being remembered in the will doesn’t bug me all that seriously. I still got those crazy phone calls from him late at night, and he’d tell me what was going down. Yeah, he’d tell me how Bob was ripping him off in small ways and we’d laugh at that, because Dermot didn’t care that Bob was getting his laundry done in Mississauga and charging him for a forty-mile drive. He told me that he charged him for going to buy his special unsalted, raw cashew nuts and arrowroot biscuits in Oshawa and charging him the mileage.”

  “Wait a minute, I don’t get this. How could he charge back the mileage?”

  “It happened like this. Dermot lent Bob the money to buy that house in Cabbagetown. He lent him the cash. Bob was supposed to be paid for the odd jobs he did for Dermot, so Dermot got him to keep track and mark off these expenses against the total loan. Of course he was paying him for the work he did in Dermot’s studio, over at 18 Clarence Square, you know, in the corner, south of King, off Spadina?”

  “No, I’ve never been there.”

  “Well, nothing’s been changed. It’s still there. All of Dermot’s Canadian and American recordings are there. So is all of Dermot’s recording equipment.”

  “Has the estate been paying rent on that place?”

  “Rent? Hell no. It was Dermot’s. They only have to pay the taxes, water, sewage—that sort of stuff.”

  “I’ll remember that.” I took a sip from a new draft set in front of me. “So, you brought Bob Foley into Dermot Keogh’s world four years ago, and that effectively pulled your plug.”

  “Yeah, you could say it like that. But, like I told you, Dermot and I still kept in touch.”

  “Right. Now, was it Bob who brought Ray Devlin into Dermot’s affairs?”

  “No, I think Ray was always working for Dermot, doing contracts and what have you, all the legal stuff that an entertainer needs. Not the management stuff. He looked after most of that himself or delegated it to Bob. Early on, he had a guy in New York, but Dermot got rid of him. Yeah, Dermot was always complaining to me that he could never get Ray on the phone when he needed him. It pissed him off royally. Or as Dermot would have said, it ‘peeved’ him.”

  “Did he ever mention the creation of a palliative care unit to you?”

  “How did you hear about that?”

  “He did, then?”

  “Sure. Dermot was always a health nut in theory, but he really never looked after himself. He loved to eat and drink and, you know, fool around. But, the year before he died, early in the new year, Dermot’s father got sick. I mean really sick. Dermot knew that he was dying, and he did die about a year later. That’s when he started talking to me about setting up a unit that would deal humanely with hopeless cases. That’s the way he was. He hated to see anything suffer. He was always bringing home stray cats to Clarence Square, and I had to tell him that the cat hair was no good for the computer equipment. ‘Screw the equipment,’ he’d say. That was Dermot.”

  I paused, hoping that Jesse would continue without prompting. He looked at his watch, took another swallow and picked up the story.

  “The last time I talked to Dermot, he woke me up at three in the morning to tell me as a surprise that the unit was a reality. He said it was fully provided for. His old man was still alive then, so I thought good on Dermot. But nothing came of it. Not while Dermot was alive, not after his father died and then not even when Dermot’s will was read. Something’s funny, I used to say to myself. You know what I mean, Benny?”

  I told him that I thought I did. Together we walked over to the other table and joined the other technicians. We downed a few rounds before they had to return to their assignments. I was left with my share of the tab and sat there trying to get a time sequence straight in my head.

  TWENTY

  I had something on my mind and I thought Chuck Pepper was the one to fix it. I called him from the pay phone near the front of the pub.

  “Pepper.” His voice on the phone sounded the way a cop’s voice ought to. I trusted that voice.

  “Chuck, it’s Cooperman. How’s it going?” I’m sure he could hear and recognize the din behind me. Still, he didn’t say anything. Sykes or Boyd would have.

  “The forensic people want you to join up, Benny. Your suggestions on the Foley case paid off. Far too much cigarette ash for the number of butts and packages. They even went further: they say the ash was new; it wasn’t mixed in with floor dust enough for it to have been an accumulation over time. I reckon that makes you a happy camper, Benny?”

  “What’s it got to do with me? I was just being helpful. But, while we’re on the subject of forensics, what about the glasses in the kitchen and the yellow rubber gloves?”

  “You hit a nerve there too. They aren’t as happy about that; think they should have thought of it themselves. There’s one good print inside the glove. But they don’t have much to compare it with. It wasn’t Foley’s. Not his ex-wife’s either.”

  “Could you do me a favour, Chuck?”

  “What else have I ever done for you?”

  “I need to know—no, wait a minute—you need to know the combination of the lock that Jack and Jim had cut off the locker in Vanessa Moss’s office. I’ve been bugging Jack about it since I first met him a week ago and he still hasn’t found out, or if he has, he hasn’t told me. But then, I’ve been made Out of Bounds by the Chief. You heard about that, I suppose?”

  “Yeah, Jack called me. The Chief put his head in the microwave. Nothing he could do about it. But what’s this about locks?”

  “I’ve got a half-baked idea, Chuck. But if it turns out to be better than that, it could be important, and I don’t want to be connected with it any more than I have to. You want a clean chain of evidence, and I don’t want to foul it for you.”

  “I’ll call Jack about it. I won’t mention your name. I’ll say the half-baked idea was all mine.” I heard a blurred sound. Chuck left the line for a moment. When he came back, he asked if I could meet him for breakfast in the morning. We arranged a spot near my hotel, and we both went back to work.

  I got no flack from Security when I returned to NTC. I was whizzed through like I was wearing Commander Dunkery’s own identity card. Vanessa was standing in her office with the door open, looking down onto University Avenue. An amateur gunman could have got off a few rounds at her without stepping far from the elevator.

  “Are you trying to get yourself killed?” I said, closing the doors behind me. “You can’t go on exposing yourself to danger.”

  “Benny, you really still believe that I’m in danger?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “I survived four days in L.A. without getting shot, didn’t I?”

  “Renata was killed right here in Toronto. In L.A. you get killed breathing the air. I could have gunned you down from the elevator without getting out, Vanessa. Maybe I’m being dramatic, but—”

  “You’re being a mother hen and ridiculous.”

  “What are you talking about?” I told her about the 222s I’d taken from her. I wasn’t planning to tell her things that would upset her. A Vanessa innocent of the threats to her life was easier to manage than the one with a loaded gun under her pillow, and, besides, she seemed stronger since she got back from the coast. The buzz of having defeated Ted Thornhill was still with her, adding to the high she was experiencing. She threw a few papers into the wastebasket and handed me the jacket she had been wearing. I held it as she slid into the silky sleeves.

  “There! That’s all the damage I can do for today. Tomorrow is another day. God, I hope so! How about taking me out for a drink, Benny? I think I deserve one.”

  We left the building, getting not a breath of criticism from the guard at the security desk. He noted our passage in a log as we crossed to the revolving doors. I made a mental note as I stood back while Vanessa’s long legs moved her qui
ckly through the whirling glass. She hailed a taxi and was sliding into the back seat before I could get the door of the cab open. I recognized that I was not good at this, or that I was as good at it as I was going to get.

  The top of the Park Plaza never changed, she said as a smiling waiter with silver hair led the way to a table overlooking the city. “It’s not even called the Park Plaza any more, but it’s too much of an institution to change with every change of management. The Park Plaza was the first steel and concrete building this far north. Bloor Street was almost Toronto’s northern boundary when it went up.” I asked Vanessa what she wanted to drink, and when she told me, I placed an order with the waiter for a single malt and a rye and ginger ale. When he returned with the drinks, he referred to Vanessa’s as her “usual.” For a minute I stared at my drink while she looked into the pinpoints of light in the darkness.

  “Vanessa, I want you to answer some questions.”

  “Benny! Lighten up! Relax for thirty seconds. What kind of questions?”

  “You phoned me back last Thursday night. Why did you say you didn’t?”

  “You don’t know that I did.”

  “Let’s try to keep things simple. Nobody but you knew my number. It had to have been you. Why did you call?”

  “If you must know, I had a presentiment of how the night would end, and just for a minute, I got cold feet.”

  “You’re entitled.”

  “I’m glad you came, Benny. I don’t know how I would have got through the night without you. And I did have all the best intentions about your poor eye.”

  “Never mind my poor eye. Tell me what you know about the gun you keep under your pillow?”