Howard Engel - The Cooperman Variation

“Savas told me you answer a question with a question. How is he? Has he made inspector yet?” For two minutes I brought them up to date about Chris Savas and his present status in the Niagara Regional Police. When I’d finished, Sykes shook his head as if I’d just asked him a question. “You know,” he said, “after all the shit going down in Grantham these days, I don’t know why a freelancer like yourself gets in his car and drives to Silver City looking for work. You know what I mean? When those tapes turned up under the false ceiling in the Medaglia case, after the place had been searched a dozen times, I mean, don’t you want to hide your head or something?”

“Are you making a soliloquy, Sergeant, or was that a question?”

“Don’t get me wrong. You weren’t on that case probably, being a rent-a-cop, but when there’s that much shit going down, a little brushes off on everybody whether they’re involved or not.”

“Like you collected in the Wentworth case?” I asked. “Kids are always getting their livers poisoned, aren’t they, when bad nurses are allowed to roam the floors of the Rose of Sharon Hospital at night.”

“There’s no crap on my boot, Cooperman,” Sykes said, straightening and getting his motion seconded by a groan from the chair. “The inquiry cleared us completely, or did your lips turn blue before you’d read that far? The papers are never so happy as when they’ve got a cop to hang out to dry, peeper.”

“Why don’t you tell me how you manage traffic lights and colour-coded index cards? Party games tire me. Why don’t we cut out the dancing around?” I got him with the colour-blindness: he blinked like a sports czar with his hand caught in the pension fund.

“What are you doing in my town, Mr. Cooperman?”

“I’ve been hired to keep somebody from getting killed.”

“Oh? So, you’re a bodyguard now! Next week it’ll be the secret service.”

I turned to Boyd and asked, “Is it the audience that gets him excited, or is he always like this?” Boyd opened his mouth as though about to utter, but closed it when Sykes stood up, letting his height, looming above me, play the cheap menace trick. I tried not to look intimidated, knowing all the time that he could chew me up in little pieces and swallow me without choking. I tried to look bored. “Why are you acting the heavy in this, Sykes? Didn’t I come to you? Didn’t I show my credentials? Didn’t I do the diplomatic thing? What do you want from my life? I’m just trying to make a living.” Sykes and Boyd exchanged looks. I waited. In his own good time Sykes moved my credentials across the desk towards me. Taking my time from him, I put them away in my wallet.

“Okay, if you’ll cut the crap, I will. I was just trying to see how you bounced. No offence. Saves time in the end. So, the Moss woman has hired you? You buy her story that she was the intended victim?”

“She hired me, didn’t she? That must say something. She’s scared that whoever killed Renata Sartori was really after her.”

“Yeah. We’re back in the movies again. But you could just as easily be a blind. You could be window dressing.”

“I didn’t come here to argue with you, Sergeant. You know a lot more than I do. This is my first day on the job. You’ve got a two-week hop on me and resources I can’t even imagine. If you think she did it, you must have good reasons. Since she’s not out on bail or in the lock-up, you can’t make a charge stick yet.”

“She had the motive, the opportunity, and we found the spent shotgun shells in her locker. Now, in my book, that puts the fancy wrapping paper around the package.”

When your eyeballs suddenly leap out of your head, there is hardly anything you can do to avoid looking like an animated cartoon of a cat being hit on the head by a large mallet. I took out my handkerchief and blew my nose loudly. I tried to work it out. I wanted to think. I thought of England, remembered the Maine , to help my breathing return to normal. I was smart enough not to speak. I nodded twice to give a sage indication of the assessment Jack Sykes had just made of the evidence pointing to Vanessa’s guilt. Of course, the whole scenario hit me all at once. Vanessa hadn’t told me because I might not take on her little problem. Shotgun shells found in her locker! She was damned right I would have stayed at home cultivating my non-existent garden. I was blazing mad at my own stupidity and more than a little upset by my old friend Stella Seco. I attempted a smile.

“You’ll have to convince me about the motive. She’s looking for people shooting down on her from above, not shooting up from below. I’ve seen her in action. She can handle the little guys without resorting to weapons larger than a pink slip. Opportunity? I thought she could demonstrate that she was out of town.”

“Conveniently out of town.”

“And I’m the convenient dodge to put you off. She hires me to show that she couldn’t possibly be the guilty party. Everything is looking suspicious because it’s convenient for your suspect. It’s one of those ‘if you thought that I thought that you thought that I thought’ routines. You can’t collar her with ifs.”

“You just see if I can’t.” He reached into the bottom right-hand drawer of his dull grey desk and lifted out a plastic freezer bag. Inside lay two used red shotgun shells. He threw the bag at me, and I picked it up. To me one shotgun shell looks like another, but I tried not to show it.

“You found these in her locker, right? Where do they get off having lockers in fancy offices like hers?”

“I wondered that too. She says that there are sensitive documents that need overnight protection a little stronger than your average filing cabinet or desk. I know that a locker closed with a-” Here he paused long enough to retrieve a second plastic freezer bag from the same drawer. “-combination lock isn’t Fort Knox, but you have to admit it’s safer than-”

“Where you keep your evidence, for example,” I said.

“During working hours, Cooperman. During working hours.” Again he tossed the bag towards me and again I examined it through the plastic. It was an ordinary combination lock that, by the look of its broken shackle, had been cut off by powerful bolt cutters.

“You’ve tried the combination of this lock against the combination you got from your suspect?”

Sykes looked me straight in the face and said, “Sure we did.” It was one of his little white lies. I could read that much in his partner’s face. Boyd didn’t say much, but he provided lots of information without troubling his vocal cords.

“Where did all of this take place, Sergeant?”

“You better call me Jack like everybody else or they won’t know who you’re talking about. You’re Sam, is that right?” For a minute I thought he knew about my brother who works across the street from NTC in one of the hospitals.

“‘Ben’ or ‘Benny’ will do nicely. And you get ‘Jim,’ is that right, Sergeant Boyd?” I asked, turning towards him. He nodded. The three of us took a breath and waited for the second act to begin on an even keel. Only it couldn’t start yet, because I had to hurry back to NTC to meet some of the possible villains in this case. And I wanted to speak to my damned client about omissions in her story.

The meeting on the twentieth floor was a blur of names and faces. There was a balding six-footer sitting across from me called a comptroller, but what the two women bracketing me did, I never learned. I couldn’t begin to sort them all out. I counted the bodies, divided them into men and women and promptly forgot the result. There were about half a dozen women, maybe, and twice that many men. The men affected a studied casualness in their dress: leather jackets gently cupping generous bellies, sweaters from the Outer Hebrides and Irish tweed over Gallagher shirts. The women had adopted more conservative pant suits and tailored skirts, both real and imitation top labels. I patted my pocket for the Kit Kat bar. I’d left it someplace. I could only hope that there would be coffee and biscuits.