Howard Engel - The Cooperman Variation

“What the hell can you do? You don’t carry. Maybe you’re a karate hero and we don’t know about it. And what the hell are you doing here? Your client could be dead four or five times while you’re shooting the shit with us.”

“That’s something you can take up with her. She’s within her rights. If she needs her head examined, that’s her lookout. Besides, I had to make contact with you guys. You knew I was here, so I had to drop around as soon as I could, or I’d be in deep trouble whenever our paths crossed later on, right?”

“Right. So you think we’ve got inside help?”

“How else would you know I was in town? I just got here and you knew all about me. It figures that you’ve got a snitch inside NTC.”

“Snitching’s a dirty job. Nobody loves a snitch. Does that hold for PIs, Benny?”

“I didn’t go looking for this job any more than you did. It’s all in a day’s work with me too. And frankly, I can use the business. She’s paying a good dollar plus expenses. I tried to talk her out of it. She thinks I’m a hotshot. What am I going to do about it?”

“Okay, so you’re the hotshot from Grantham, watching over a suspect-hey! That’s another movie, isn’t it? The one with the ‘Bell Song’ from Lakme , right?”

“It was from Lakme , but not the ‘Bell Song.’ It was a duet. Two women, like the two men in The Pearl Fishers . Close harmonies.” This contribution came from Jim Boyd. Next he’d be ordering vodka martinis, shaken not stirred. He was full of surprises.

The conversation shifted to internal police talk of retirement, pensions, holidays, dental plans and other collective benefits. I watched Boyd and Sykes. They weren’t excluding me, but there wasn’t anything I could add to the discussion. Still, they were having it in front of me, which might be seen as a sort of acceptance into the Toronto Police Grousing Society. I started counting the bubbles in my cup and collecting the crumbs of my Danish with moist fingertips. When I retired from doing private investigations, it would be because I’d found a less stressful way of making a living.

“Consultants aren’t worth shit,” Sykes was saying apropos of something I’d missed. “When you press them for the stuff that led to their findings, they won’t show them to you, because in most cases those findings don’t exist. Then they’ll tell you off the record that their findings were concocted on the basis of what they thought we wanted to hear. The customer is always right.”

“Depends on the outfit you use,” Boyd protested. As for me, I got up and went to the john. When I got back, they were arguing about something of more interest to me than portable dental plans. They were going over the evidence in the two freezer bags.

“Art Dempsey told me that these things haven’t been made since around 1935. Used to get them through the English Army and Navy Stores in London. After 1935, they went in for a different style. Same half-brass base and cardboard case, but different powder and printing. The wadding that went with the pellets into the victim came from the shells we recovered in her boss’s locker.” Boyd was muttering this to Sykes, who was listening with his eyes half shut. I took my chair and tried not to make it squeak as I sat down.

“That sounds right up your alley, Benny. If the shells were that old, we are looking for an antique weapon. Isn’t that the sort of thing private eyes in books are always running into? Indonesian stilettoes, bejewelled Tong daggers, Thug axes, antique sporting guns?” Sykes eyed me with a single open eye under a raised eyebrow.

“Sure,” I said, “when we can’t get murder by tiger whiskers in the stew or icicles rammed into the victim’s heart. Why, only last week, I solved a case of murder involving a gun that was fired automatically by a string tied to the door knocker. Killed three Girl Guides in a line. He did it for the cookies, I figure.”

Boyd laughed, and even Sykes cracked a grin.

“Week before that, I uncovered a mad archer who replaced her deadly arrows in the victims with icepicks when nobody was looking. She had me fooled for about thirty seconds.”

“Okay, okay! Enough’s enough. Chris Savas is right about you, Benny: we can’t bullshit you into going back home, can we, Jim?”

“Welcome to Toronto, Benny.” Boyd passed the sugar, which had been lying just beyond my reach. I took it as a peace offering.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, we were sitting in Boyd’s car outside a house on the north side of Balmoral Avenue. It was in an area of modest to big houses, sandwiched between main north-south streets. Sykes said that it was about a fifteen-minute drive from here to NTC. An old Catholic cemetery ran along the back of the house, Boyd told me, leaving a skimpy garden behind to match the one in front. The three-storey brick house was attached to the two neighbouring houses, leaving a front door, still decorated with torn scraps of yellow “Crime Scene” tape, as the only access from the street.

The two cops rolled their bodies heavily out of the car and lumbered up to the house. Sykes had the keys to it and to half a dozen other places; these he slowly excluded from his selection. The door opened inward into a narrow hall, useful for storing a few overcoats and a snow shovel. A second frosted-glass door introduced us to the rest of the house. The opening side of this had been peppered with stray shotgun pellets, and a blackened smear in the same area reminded me why we were here. To the right were heavily carpeted stairs going to the second floor and, to the left, a passage to the kitchen in the rear. Someone had placed a plaid blanket over the bloodstained broadloom; otherwise it was impossible to go anywhere in the house without walking through the darkened gore.

The rooms on the ground floor had recently been painted; the lush carpeting looked less than two years old. The decorations and furniture were a credit to whomever Vanessa relied upon completely for this sort of thing. Besides a baby grand piano, there was every electronic media device known to man, mostly ranged in a black metal stack against one wall. The results were not uncomfortable, but there was a prepackaged feel to the effect. I tried to imagine the faces I’d seen a few hours ago around the boardroom table relaxing in these surroundings. No, the decor discouraged relaxation. There was a hint of the principal’s office about the dark wood accents and bookcases. If Vanessa herself relaxed, it was not in the front room.

The kitchen was white, bright and contemporary, with refrigerator notes held up by magnets disguised as tiny bunches of cauliflower and broccoli. I looked over the notes for something that would introduce itself as a clue. There were a couple of New Yorker cartoons with a media theme. One showed a bunch of groundskeepers sweeping the sidewalks and patios of New York’s Lincoln Center with witches’ brooms and gnarled wooden rakes. The caption read something about using only original instruments.

Whenever I looked at Sykes or Boyd, I caught him looking at me. Did they expect me to uncover in a minute what their whole team had missed for two weeks? That’s all I needed to cut the fragile bond of co-operation completely.

“Okay,” I said after an interminable silence, “what do you know about the terms of the victim’s stay here? Was she a guest, a tenant or what?”

“According to your client,” Sykes said, using both hands to make quotation marks in the air on either side of his head, “Sartori called Moss and asked to stay for the weekend of the thirteenth. Moss told her that she was going out of town and that she could stay the week if she wanted.”

“Renata had a good job at NTC. Didn’t she have a place of her own?”