Howard Engel - The Cooperman Variation

She was angry at me now. Partially because she thought she had reached a position where nobody could talk to her like that and partially because she knew I was right.

“Okay, Benny, get out your notebook.” I grabbed a pad from my new desk. “I live on Balmoral Avenue. That’s two south of St. Clair, off Avenue Road. The place is owned jointly by me and my husband. I’ve been there for five years. Everybody at CBC, CTV and all the other places I’ve worked knows the place. I like to give big parties. Everybody in this building knows the house, the garden and maybe even how to get into the backyard from the cemetery at the rear. All of those people you met in the boardroom were at a party two months ago. I gave it to encourage our efforts before the sweeps. Talk about business losses.”

“What are the sweeps?”

“Benny! Your innocence is astonishing. It’s like not knowing what’s at the end of the Yellow Brick Road,” she said, smiling indulgently. Then she cleared her throat and began again. “The sweeps are the audience surveys run at fixed times of the year. Independent head-counters measure our audiences for a test week. Our advertising rates for the next season are based on the numbers they come up with. Part of our job is to make sure that our best efforts go into those important time-slots.” I scribbled all of this on the pad I balanced on my knee, and hoped to be able to translate my shorthand afterwards. She kept right on going.

“I found the place at the lake through Ed Patel, a small-town lawyer and an old friend of my Poppa’s. They used to hunt and fish together. The cottage is in my name; I have eight years to go before I renew the mortgage. It’s not a big place, just seven acres with only seventy-five feet of lake frontage. The lake is Muskoka. The nearest big town is Bracebridge, but Port Carling is where you go to buy charcoal and milk. Are you getting all this, Benny?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but kept larding on the facts and details. “The place is called Puckwana , and, no, I don’t know what it means. Probably Ojibway. The house replaced a log house dating from the turn of the century. The frame house is only fifty years old. I go up there to be by myself, although that’s getting harder and harder to do since Hollywood people like Peggy O’Toole and Goldie Hawn discovered Muskoka. Apart from the cellphone I leave in my car, there is no e-mail, Internet or fax up there. There is a phone, but it’s in the name of the former owner. It never rings. The lawyer I mentioned, Ed Patel, my nearest neighbour, lives an eighth of a mile away, but he’s in the Bracebridge hospital, so he didn’t see me while I was there. Nor did his secretary, Alma, because she electrocuted herself in the bath. Am I going too fast?

“I was in the bookstore in Port Carling, but I don’t know if I created enough of a stir to make your life easy for you. You might try the Esso station on the town-side of the lift lock. I filled my tank there and got the attendant to wash my windshield. I didn’t stop to eat on my drive back to the city; I just nibbled on the things that would perish if I left them in the cottage fridge and planned on a good dinner when I got home, a dinner I never got to order, because I walked into the arms of Sergeant Jack Sykes and his merry men in blue sitting in my livingroom. How am I doing? What have I left out?”

“When exactly was that, Vanessa?”

“I arrived home about noon on Monday, the twentysecond of May. The long weekend, remember? I wanted to avoid the mob scene on the highways later on, and I did.”

“So, Renata was killed on Monday, the fifteenth.”

“What a brain! You want more about Renata? I met her when we were both nobodies, just starting out. We lived on next to nothing at 410 Jarvis Street; it was a flophouse run by an old radio actor who’d lost both his arms. That was close to the CBC in those days. Hamp Fisher was still setting up NTC. He was switching from newspapers to TV.” She stopped talking when she saw that the name had changed my expression. “Ah, you’ve heard about him? Hamp Fisher’s the chairman and controlling shareholder of NTC. Owns about forty-two per cent of the voting shares. Nice for Hamp. Renata, on the other hand, worked her passage up from the mailroom and typing pool. Mostly at CBC. She did time at CITY and Global too. Back then, you moved fairly freely back and forth between the networks looking for somebody who’d let you try out new things. She knew about numbers, so she came out the other end here at NTC as budget manager of different shows.”

“Friends? Enemies?”

“She dated two budget chiefs-I can give you their names-an actor or two- they’ll give you their names, and for a brief moment she was the lover of the one and only Dermot Keogh. Remember I told you that her book show had one listener? It was Dermot. He watched it wherever he went. But their affair didn’t last long. She started as his bookkeeper and worked her way through from the office to the bedroom. I thought she’d made the gravy train at last, but it didn’t stick. It never did with Dermot. Of course, this time it was his death that got in the way.”

“How long was it before he drowned?”

“Oh, they were at it hot and heavy for about two months. He died in the last week of April last year.”

“Which lake did he drown in?”

“Muskoka. What other lake have we been talking about? Benny, a lot of people around here have places in Muskoka. Have you ever heard about the Bradings Trust?” Her face was about a foot away from mine by now, and she had been talking a mile a minute.

“Tell me about it.”

“Ernest Miller Bradings left a huge property on the lake to a trust, which has, for reasons I don’t think are relevant, sold off pieces to people in the industry.”

“TV people, you mean?”

“Closer than that. Many of the top people here at NTC have bought lake lots from the trust. It’s not exclusive, of course, but the Bradings properties are worth avoiding if you’re trying to get away from it all.” She got to her feet. “There, Benny, that’s all for now. We can have another go when your writing hand stops tingling.”

“Could you ask Sally to give me a list of the people I saw at that production meeting, Vanessa? And if there’s a rundown on each of them, I wouldn’t mind seeing that as well.” I tacked on this request as a bid for elbow-room.

“I’ve already instructed Sally to get you anything you want-short of old videos of movies from the forties. (This isn’t a joyride, Benny.) You may find Sally reluctant to be your pal on things. Just tell me if she drags her heels or gives you excuses. She’ll try that, but don’t take it from her. I mean it. If you say please too often, you’ll never get her to find you a postage stamp.”

“You seem skilled in the ways of the Sallys of this world.”

“Yes, the Sallys, the Jack McKellars, the Rod Sinclairs and the rest of them.”

Vanessa was still standing up under the pressure of a non-stop day. Her Armani suit was looking a little wilted around the edges, but I guess that’s part of the look. She shot me a wan smile and sat down to work again. She asked me to leave the door open. I was dismissed.

Someone had set up a dull wooden desk in a corner near one of the windows. It had a black leather inlay on the top surface and nothing in the IN and OUT baskets. The drawer offered paperclips in metal and colourful plastic. There were a couple of pink erasers and a clutch of sharp yellow pencils. When I worked briefly for a lawyer, a cousin of mine, he issued new pencils on an “as needed” basis: show him a stub shorter than one and a half inches, and he would replace it happily with a longer one. The same scene-shifters who had brought my desk had moved Vanessa’s out of the line of fire. It made the whole deal more sporting.