Howard Engel - The Cooperman Variation

“Hello, Benny,” she said in that voice that melted steel. “It’s been too long. How have you been?”

I didn’t answer for a minute, I just kept looking. At last I cleared my throat and found some inadequate words. “You look terrific, Stella. Come in.” She walked around me when I failed to clear the doorway.

Stella and I had been at Grantham Collegiate Institute and Vocational School together. Forget the fifteen hundred other teenagers. She was my first great love. She was the first great love of every male in the school. None of us, as far as I know, ever scored with Stella. There was a protective family watching over every step she took in her nickel loafers. Not that there was a scarcity of Stella-watchers. Truth to tell, Stella provided a lot of us with not only a richly imagined sex life, but with our chief incentive to stay in school. Where the challenge of French irregular verbs and the binomial theorem failed to ignite our attention, where the three results of the Persian Wars and the Keystone Clause in the American Constitution failed us, there was Stella walking down the aisle to take her seat. There are bankers and doctors today in this city who would have been clerks and technicians had it not been for Stella Seco’s cool gaze and liquid walk.

Of course, the girls in the school hated her, as I discovered later on. They were as envious of her looks as the rest of us were of her good marks in everything from algebra to zoology. Girlfriends understood that their pinned dates’ eternal devotion was subject to the possibility that Stella might nod in their direction. Stella was magic. Stella lit up the sky.

I remember one story of her sitting with some girlfriends in the Rec Hut, the coffee shop across from the school, when she saw a football player crossing the street. She asked who he was and then announced that he was going to take her to the next big school dance. And he did! It was typical of Stella’s sense of herself and her power, which the senior girls ascribed to the neardrunken state certain adipose tissue can induce in the male. Some girls even went so far as to suggest that, in certain areas, nature had been assisted. From where I was standing, the results were still convincing.

“I’m on my way to a meeting with the head of the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. I haven’t been in Grantham in ten years. The old place doesn’t change much, does it?” Her climb up my steep stairs added to the breathlessness in her voice. There was also a nervousness. I knew she’d get around to her reason for this reappearance in my life after an agreeable ramble. “… But this isn’t a social call, Benny,” she said at last, as though she’d been reading over my shoulder. “I’m in trouble and I need help.” I pulled the best seat in the house from its normal place and brought it around behind her. We both sat down, but for Stella the act of sitting was a symphony for the eyes-my politically incorrect, unreconstructed eyes, anyway.

“Trouble,” I repeated. “Tell me. Tell me all about it.”

“First of all, I’m not Stella Seco any more. I’ve been Vanessa Moss for nearly fifteen years.”

“I’ve heard that name somewhere. Recently.”

“I married Paul Moss-”

“The disc jockey from the radio station! Deep voice, like roasted velvet. Yeah, I remember him.”

“I was eighteen, Benny. I was on my own again when I was twenty.” I nodded to show that I was keeping up with her. She rooted around in her bag for the cigarettes that, judging by her expression, she had recently given up. She found a candy mint, held it for a moment, then flung it back into her bag. I could sympathize with that. I had never discovered anything to replace my habit either.

“Life with Paul was very complex, even after I quit school. He taught me a lot about broadcasting, but in the end I couldn’t hack it. Paul, I mean. Poppa made him give me an annulment. I did a catch-up year in Hamilton, then did a three-year B.A. in Toronto. You quit school too, didn’t you, Benny?”

“I managed to hold on until I graduated. They didn’t have to burn the place down to get me out after all. We missed you when you left, Stella. It was as if all the lights went from one hundred watts to forty. Did you know you had that effect on us?”

“Benny, that was years ago. And how can I answer that anyway? I know I have a certain effect on people, but I haven’t worked it out to a science. I always knew I was a good-looking broad. The rest was-well …”

“Why ‘Vanessa’? How did you get to ‘Vanessa’ from ‘Stella’?”

“That was the doing of one of my mentors. I’ve had a few of those. He said it had something to do with Jonathan Swift. I’ve been climbing the rickety ladder called broadcasting, Benny. I’ve already met all of the people I’m going to run into on my way down. But at the moment, I’m sitting pretty, except for … Let me finish what I came to say, Benny. We can talk about the old days later.”

“Sure, Stella. I want to hear what you have to say.”

“Since June last year I’ve been the Entertainment head at the National Television Corporation. I knew when I took the job that it wasn’t going to be easy, but I didn’t expect that they would be literally gunning for me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Renata Sartori was an old friend of mine.”

“Have I heard that name too, somewhere?”

“If you tune in on our channel. I used to live with her when I first came to Toronto. Two weeks ago, she was staying at my place. I was away. She was alone, wearing one of my dressing gowns. She answered the door and somebody shot her in the face with a shotgun. Both barrels.”

“Jesus! That’s where I heard your name: on the news.”

“For a week, the cops thought that I was the corpse. Me! You can’t blame them, really. It was my house, my dressing gown and Renata’s face …” Stella winced, shutting her eyes for a moment.

“You can skip that part.”

“The press outdid themselves: ENTERTAINMENT HEAD BLOWN AWAY! NETWORK CHIEF BLASTED! That kind of thing. When I came back into town-I was away at my place on Lake Muskoka-I walked right into the investigation. Even the cops thought I was a ghost.”

“It’s like Laura!” I said. “You know, the book and the movie?”

“I know, I know. Now I know what it’s like to be Gene Tierney. It was a Preminger film; 1944 or ’5.”

“The heavy was-”

“‘That venomous fishwife, Addison de Witt.’ No, that was the critic, George Sanders, in All About Eve . This was Waldo Lydecker, played by Clifton Webb.”

“The cop was Dana Andrews.” I was glad to be able to make a contribution.

“You’re right. I forgot. Anyway, this is too much fiction coming true for me. Somebody wants to see me dead, Benny. That’s why I’ve come to you. I need help.”

“When exactly did all this happen?”

“Renata was murdered two weeks ago yesterday, Monday night around ten, according to the forensic report.”

“In the movie, the maid found the body. Who found Renata?”

“In the forties there were maids. I have a cleaning woman. And Lydia thought it was me. Everybody thought it was me. I’ve been dead on the front page of every Toronto newspaper, Benny. I had to call all my friends and relatives to say it wasn’t true. Now that I’m alive again, I’m just as vulnerable as I was before Renata was murdered.”

“Who do the police suspect killed Renata?”

“Me, for one.”

“You!”

“Sure. They say I was jealous of her. She was moving up in the Network hierarchy. She’d been given more responsibility. She even had a show of her own. Reading with Renata? Sunday afternoons? She hosted it herself. It made her into a minor celebrity of sorts. The show played against all the football games in the world. It had an audience of one. Wait a minute: that isn’t fair. She has built an audience. Not huge, in TV terms, but it’s as big an audience as any book show gets outside France.