by Howard Engel
“Why are the city police letting you meddle around in their investigation?”
“How can they stop me? I’m not corrupting their crime scenes. I’m not strong-arming their suspects. Even when the chief of police gets word of me, and he warns his men about me, I still manage to find things out and put your back up.”
“You think that was me?”
“You’d be my first guess.” Trebitsch didn’t like to feel so transparent. He looked around for a waitress, and found her hard to get, reminding me of Marlowe. I enjoyed watching him flounder; it annoyed him and his image of himself surrounded by yes-men. At last attention was finally paid to this man and he ordered a Coors Lite. “Why do I put your back up? You’re not the only suspect in this murder who works for NTC. How is it that you imagine yourself their best bet?”
“I knew Renata. We go back a long way. I knew she was staying at Vanessa’s house while she was away. I also talked to her on the day she died.”
“Okay, I revise my opinion. Frankly, I didn’t know that. So, you see, I haven’t dug a deep trench into you yet. If you knew that Renata was in the house, not Vanessa, then you’re unlikely to be accused of trying to kill Vanessa. We all know she had enemies, and you were one of them, but you wouldn’t shoot the wrong woman.”
“I didn’t shoot anybody. Yes, I want Vanessa out of Entertainment. I want a bigger share of the time she controls. She won’t compromise because she can generate sweetheart deals for every second of that time. Her successor, who is already waiting in the wings, will cut me more slack. Look, even Vanessa knows her time here is finished. Why is she fighting it?”
“Why do you take it so personally?”
“Because it’s my fucking life. I’m ambitious. That’s not a crime in television.”
“What did you talk to Renata about?”
“She started in about some huge conspiracy. Couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Something to do with Dermot Keogh. I was taking another call and being briefed by one of my people while I was on the phone. Frankly, I never listened to Renata with both ears. She was great, don’t get me wrong, but she was more fun to be with than to listen to. There was a physical dimension. Ask anybody. But that day she was upset. I got that part of the message. Now, tell me when you’ll be returning to Grantham. I’m looking forward to that event. You know that.”
“Why do you want that so bad?”
“The longer you stick around NTC, Mr. Cooperman, the longer Vanessa will keep her job. You bring a whole ambience of unsettled mayhem with you wherever you go. Ted Thornhill’s terrified of you. I know this. Once you’re gone, things will return to normal and Vanessa Moss will leave.”
“I was hired to protect Vanessa. She’ll turn me loose as soon as she’s convinced she’s in no further danger. I think that might be sometime before the weekend.”
“Can you be more precise?”
“I’d like to be out of here by Friday.”
“This is Wednesday.”
“Yes, it usually follows Tuesday. But why are you so worried? There’s something more, Mr. Trebitsch; something you’ve left out. How have I been stamping on your corns?” Trebitsch stared into his beer for a moment, then looked up.
“The first thing I ever sold to this network was an interview with a gravedigger who’d grown disenchanted with his profession. It proved to be a great hit. The guy was really funny. People remembered me as the producer.”
“Well?”
“The interview was a fake. The gravedigger was a struggling filmmaker who’d never held a shovel or dug a grave. That didn’t matter. The item made me. But it continues to haunt me and could unmake me. I’ve never faked anything since, but that four-minute item—we allowed longer items in those days—gives me nightmares. Vanessa knows the truth about that piece. She watched me edit it. She could expose me at any moment.”
“You underestimate her. If she wanted your scalp, she wouldn’t dig up your past. In News, you’re your own worst enemy. ‘The Trebitsch Look’ gets in the way of the stories. Back off on the personal signature, and your stock will go up. Not only here but in California.”
“Who have you been talking to?”
“Never mind, but hear this: Winkler of Warner Brothers is watching you and you keep spoiling the picture. Were you on Lake Muskoka when Dermot Keogh drowned?”
“No. I have a place up there, but Phil Rankin warned me that Dermot had suddenly taken a dislike to all NTC types, Renata Sartori excepted, of course. So, I stayed clear of him. So did Phil, Ray and others. It was too early in the season: April.”
“Why was Raymond Devlin lumped in with you NTC types?”
“He was chief NTC counsel in the CRTC hearings that year.”
“What’s that?”
“Canadian Radio-Television Commission. They supervise and grant licences to broadcasters. They could theoretically pull the plug on all or any of us. But they don’t, no matter how badly we misbehave. That’s the way socalled ‘arm’s length’ politically appointed bodies operate in this country.”
“So Dermot spent that last summer well away from all you broadcasters?”
“The lake held other attractions. Hamp Fisher and his wife, the movie star Peggy O’Toole, had started coming up there. And there were other points of interest.” He smiled at the memory, whatever it was. I tried to imagine his sort of “interest.” Then I examined my watch.
“I’ve got to go. I hope I’ve told you what you wanted to hear.”
“Hey! You haven’t told me about Winkler at Warners!”
“More news, less personality. That’s the ticket.” I could almost see his lips repeating my invented comment. I could see that I might have a future in this business.
“Goodbye, Cooperman. Remember, what I told you was said in confidence.”
“Look, Trebitsch, if I didn’t respect confidences, I wouldn’t stay in business a week. It’s a habit. But I have to find things out in order to find things out. So long.” I got up, and left it to Ken Trebitsch to pay for my beer.
There was a taxi hovering near Ye Olde Brunswick House across the street. I grabbed it, and the driver whisked me down to King and Spadina. It was a neighbourhood of ancient sock factories and seed warehouses. The old garment district was just north of King. Here, traffic caught its breath for the ramps of the Gardiner Expressway at the last-chance gas station. In the middle of all this, I found a lush, green patch: old trees with wooden seats running around the trunks and park benches. On the north side stood a solid wall of townhouses going back to the 1870s, the remnant of a square that once boxed in the park. Number eighteen was the easternmost of the houses. It looked as though it had once had a bigger building to lean against, but that had been bulldozed away, leaving the exposed, windowless flank to the elements.
The house had a Georgian feel to it: fanlight over the door, fluted brass doorknob. The entrance looked like one on a poster I once saw of front doors of Dublin. I banged on the black woodwork. When nothing happened, I tried the huge knob. It turned. I stepped into a hall that was big enough to accommodate the walking sticks of all the elected members of the 1890 House of Commons. White stairs led up to a second floor that looked dark and uninviting. The hall leading into the back of the ground floor looked more promising.
It was a huge room, originally the kitchen of the house. An old-fashioned sink and drip board in heavy porcelain dominated the side of the room with a window. But stuffed chairs, overstuffed couches, recording machines, loudspeakers the size of boxcars, racks and racks of recording tape, and cans of film formed the focus of the studio. A double door, such as you find in a radio studio, cut off the room from the rest of the house. A wall of sound-absorbing tiles had been built against the back wall, killing noises from King Street, which backed on the property. The studio was also littered with paper: paper on desks, paper on chairs and couches. A stack of magazines overflowed against a table leg upon which half a dozen film scripts, no two lying parallel, had been scattered. They say that
there is such a thing as the genius of a particular room: the room where Bach composed or where Robert Louis Stevenson wrote carries something of the essence of its owner through time. Although Dermot Keogh had been gone a year, his personality and quirks were etched on everything in the room, from the battered upright piano, a bench so broken and dangerous that it might have belonged to Glenn Gould, to the open cello case carelessly left open on a couch. The cello itself rested against a heavy music stand, the base of which was buried in music manuscripts.
“Mr. Rankin?” I called out over deadly silence. My voice sounded as crisp as a rifle shot. But there was no answer. I looked at my watch. I was on time. “Mr. Rankin!” I shouted again. Again, no answer.
Quickly I made the rounds of the rest of the place. It was plain to see that the house was not now lived in, nor had it been inhabited for a good long time. In one room, long regimental photographs on ancient wallpaper showed that the room had not been used since shortly after the First World War. The front room, which looked out on the park, had been more recently used. The walls had been painted over embossed wallpaper. Bookshelves had been rigged on the right and left of a marble fireplace. A lone peacock feather sat in a corner with a portrait of the solemn, bearded founder of the Salvation Army. (He was identified in small print at the bottom.)
The third floor was full of rooms, all of them empty, except for a pile of warped cardboard backings that photographs had once been pasted to. Now the photographs were curled into shapes like giant pasta shells. I tried to straighten one of them out, and it broke with my effort. It was a picture of a curly-headed bus driver leaning from the window of his rustic bus, holding a rose in his smiling teeth.
I returned to the studio and made a better search. To one side of the piano, under an old drafting table, I found Philip Rankin. His stillness suited the quiet of the studio. When I turned him over, I could see a bloodstain on the front of his shirt. I thought it was odd that the smell of a gunshot wasn’t still hanging about in this airless room. But there was no hint of powder in the air. I poured myself a glass of cloudy water. The pipes groaned at the intrusion.
Rankin had been alive half an hour ago, according to his face. His fingers were still flexible and lividity had only just started, as I could see through his shirt. The little blood that surrounded the wound was hardly sticky yet. Stepping back, and holding on to the piano for support, I could see where he’d been dragged. He must have been standing or sitting in one of the few chairs that weren’t burdened with papers. I lifted the cushion. There was blood on the other side, and more under it on the chair.
No murder weapon was in sight. If it hadn’t been a gun, and the lack of the right smell convinced me that it hadn’t, then Rankin had been stabbed. But then I remembered what I’d heard about Dermot Keogh: he hated sharp objects. A quick look in the drawers under the shelves near the sink showed nothing sharper than a pencil or a cake of rosin.
“Well, well, what have we here?” It was Jack Sykes, with Jim a step or two behind him. “Your pal Rankin stand you up?”
“Not exactly,” I said. I hadn’t heard them come in. Neither had the murder victim heard the murderer, I thought. A possibility.
“What’s the matter, Benny? You look like you need to sit down.”
“Yeah, you’re as white as the walls,” added Jim. “Sit down.”
“Can’t,” I said. “Can’t foul the murder scene.” Their surprise was noted and I pointed to the body under the drafting table. Jim quickly got busy on his cellphone, while Jack examined the body. I tried to stay out of the way. I had to excuse myself and run up the stairs to the bathroom when Jack lifted the body again to look at the mortal wound. Rankin’s toupée had slipped to one side, adding a dimension something like the unkindest cut of all. By the time I came downstairs, cops of all sizes, shapes and ranks had appeared. I gave my statement to two different officers before I was allowed to leave.
When I got back to the New Beijing Inn, I reached for soap, a washcloth and the shower. Shortly after that, I was in a deep sleep, more like oblivion than a real snooze. And that’s the way I stayed for the next hour and a half.
TWENTY-FOUR
Thursday
I attended to my chores all the next day. Ted Thornhill stopped me in the hall and asked me some probing questions about what I was doing there. He was leaning over me a little like an unhappy bank manager, and talking a little louder than necessary, when I decided that I had no reason to live in fear of the CEO of NTC. I put him to bed by dropping Hamp Fisher’s name. Somehow, I brought up the fact that I’d rather be back on Lake Muskoka on the deck of Wanda III and hearing stories about my old friend, the director Jim Sayre, from the matchless lips of Peggy O’Toole. That did it. That ended any idea of starting a range war with the kid from Grantham.
Sally brought me lunch. She knew how Vanessa moved from meeting to meeting without taking nourishment. She told me that Crystal’s ex-husband had spent last evening talking to Gordon, her soon-to-be ex. After a bottle of Chivas Regal, Gordon was seeing the whole matter of his fractured life in a new and more law-abiding light. He promised not to harass her from now on.
In the course of the day I made three trips to the drugstore for Vanessa, and working with Sally and George Brenner, helped create a CV for that parking attendant and man of all work.
At about 5:30 in the afternoon, I caught a cab and let the driver take me south on Spadina, past the collection of police cruisers still parked along Clarence Square to the placid, cooler lakeshore. There were four men and a couple of women sheltering from the late-afternoon sun in the ROYC shelter at the foot of Spadina Avenue. Ray Devlin wasn’t any of them. I watched the ferry grow bigger as it approached the dock, wondering what I would do if Devlin failed to appear. This was turned into an idle speculation by Devlin’s sudden arrival in an orange-andblack taxicab. “Sorry I’m a little late,” he said, shaking hands with me. “Do you mind if I continue reading this brief? My girl just handed it to me as I went out the door.”
“Sure, I don’t mind. Wish I’d brought along something myself.” Devlin sat down inside the shelter for three or four minutes while the ferry arrived and made itself fast to the bollards. Then he got up, had a card punched and went aboard. I followed, giving up real money to the purser, if that’s what he’s called, and found a seat below decks. Ray continued to study the brief he was holding, but it didn’t make him safe from interruptions. A woman said she’d seen him on the news that afternoon. A man asked if he had had much luck with a certain anti-fouling paint. Ray gave him a short, crisp answer, which discouraged further commerce.
The trip across to the Island took about fifteen minutes and ended when we reached the dock in front of the impressive, white-and-blue-shuttered ROYC clubhouse. Here, for the first time, I saw that the initials stood for Royal Ontario Yacht Club. There was a plaque. Inside the door were photographs of commodores of the past wearing their yachting caps, paintings of yachts and their crews, a few cabinets dedicated to silver cups in annual competition and time-oranged oars hung up on the walls as decorations in commemoration of something or other. The people I saw were older than the people passing the window of the James Joyce pub. They were wearing English sweaters or club blazers. The dress code probably frowned on sandals and T-shirts, but the moment that notion crossed my mind, I saw three teenagers in sandals and T-shirts. I recognized the fact that I had to overcome a certain bias against people who could afford to own and operate boats out of this place.
I looked around for Devlin for a few minutes without any luck. He was probably making contact with his crew. They may have taken the ferry before ours. I also couldn’t find any sign of Boyd or Sykes. If they were prepared to protect me from Devlin, as Chuck Pepper had protected me from Ken Trebitsch, they were well disguised. I walked out on the well-rolled lawn, examining closely the members and their guests with their drinks and snacks. A suspicious-looking gull was watching the marina, where boat crews were busy getting a large assortmen
t of boats ready for sailing, or battening them down after bringing them back up the cut to the club. There was a stiff breeze blowing. Anyone venturing out that afternoon wasn’t going to have to use auxiliary motors. As far as I could see wind-filled sails dotted the bright blue water. Spinnakers were deployed on some boats, giving the crews a good run for their membership fees. As backdrop to all this, the city’s silhouette loomed with its office and communications towers. The SkyDome’s open roof turned that stadium into an oyster on the half-shell.
A hand on my arm made me turn suddenly. “I’m sorry, Benny, but none of my regulars is here this afternoon. Philip Rankin told me he’d be here for sure. Nick Trench is always here looking to crew for somebody. Bill Keiller’s often agreeable. But I don’t see any of them. Say, I don’t suppose that we could manage with just the two of us?” Devlin had shed his city clothes and was now wearing an ROYC-approved sailing outfit: white shorts and light yellow nylon slicker.
“Raymond, I don’t know your yacht, but most of the boats I’ve been on can be handled by two. Where is your boat?”
“She’s in the last slip at the north end of the dock, the Sir Ed Cook, spelled ‘Coke.’ I’ll have another look around in case I can find somebody wanting to crew. Tell you what,” he said, “you start off, begin taking the wrappings off, while I get my flask refilled. There’s a stiff wind out there this afternoon, and I know there’s not much to drink on board. Here’s the key to the hatch. Once that’s open, you can find yourself some clothes and shoes that will make you more comfortable. All that gear is stowed forward. Okay?”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Devlin laughed and retreated back to the clubhouse. I tried to catch the sharp eye of a gull that had followed me from the clubhouse lawn. It gave no sign that it was working undercover. Very professional.
