Howard Engel - The Cooperman Variation

“Okay, I’m not hard to get along with. Ask.”

I tried to take inventory of my new-found playmates. There were three of them: the driver and the two beside me. None of them looked like he could take punishment from Mike Tyson on a good day. They didn’t look like Moose Malloy in Farewell, My Lovely . They didn’t look like dancers from The Phantom of the Opera either. They were youngish, with their hair short except on their faces, which were masked with carefully attended stubble beards.

“When are you going back where you belong, Cooperman?”

“As soon as I can. I’ve got business here, but I’d rather be fishing. Know what I mean?”

It was the driver who was doing the talking. He leaned over the gap between his seat and the passenger seat as he moved through the sluggish traffic. He was wearing a plaid shirt with a gold medallion hanging in the V opening. “It’s not that we don’t like your company around here. But your timing’s bad. You wanna try it again, later?”

“Yeah, in about another ten years,” added a voice from my left.

“Shut the fuck up, Sid!” said the man on my right. “Let Bernie do the talking.”

“The both of you shut up!” I leaned forward, and before I quite knew what I was doing, I reached out and made a snatch for the steering wheel. The two in the back seat grabbed me fast, but the driver turned the wheel to correct for the spin he thought I’d given it. But I’d never reached the wheel, and the car went careering into a car in the outside lane. There was a back-jolting shock as we stopped, the crunch of metal, the sound of a horn and some unexpurgated expletives from the other three men in the car. I collected a punch from my two neighbours. Then a horn or two from the rear brought the driver of the car with a newly folded fender out into the street to bang on Bernie’s window.

“Shit!” he said, opening his door. “I’ll deal with you later!” he added, turning to me.

Traffic was stopped and other motorists came to offer their versions of what had happened. Traffic on Bloor Street was backing up. There was a group of four or five pedestrians crowding our car when I said a polite “Excuse me” to my captors, pushed forward the passenger seat and took to the street. Apart from more expletives from the bearded trio in the green car, I didn’t hear another thing.

Saturday

Dark and early the following morning, I paid my hotel bill and forced my way, against the grain of incoming traffic, north, out of the city, up the big highway to vacationland. Slowly, the six-lane freeway lost the city’s strong gravitational pull. First to go were the fire hydrants and curbs, then the glimpses of parking lots and streetlights, and finally, I left the cement of shopping plazas behind. Grass and fields were a good exchange. Soon I was driving by cows watching me from under trees and horses running by white fences. With a stop at a place called Webers, where I ate the nearest equivalent to a chopped-egg sandwich-a hamburger and fries-I began enjoying my sudden freedom from Silver City. Two hundred kilometres north of the big city! Here TV was something you turned on when you felt like it, not a world that consumed you. If I told the kid flipping hamburger patties on the grill at Webers that Renata Sartori may have been killed so that somebody could move a little higher on the TV ladder to success, he’d say I was crazy. But crazy or not, here I was driving north to find hard evidence that my client was in fact at her cottage while Renata was being murdered in Toronto.

On the far side of Bracebridge, which stood exactly halfway between the Equator and the North Pole, according to an official plaque, I began seeing signs at the side of the road for a place called Norchris Lodge. I needed a place to stay on Lake Muskoka and Norchris Lodge was on Lake Muskoka, just where the Muskoka River empties into it from the highlands of Algonquin Park. I drove off the two-lane road I’d been on since Bracebridge, followed the signs and at a moderate speed made it to the gravel lane leading to the office. This was housed in a large log building with, as I later discovered, a monstrous stone fireplace. Through the boughs of trees and bushes, I could see glimpses of the lake, a beach, a water slide, docks, boats and a lawn with rustic bright red wooden chairs lined up to point out the view. It was early, the season hadn’t properly started yet, so I couldn’t see many guests looking at the lake.

Christopher McArthur and his wife, Norma, ran the lodge. They were a friendly young couple with several youngsters of various ages. They were all making lastminute repairs to window screens, door hinges, motorboat gear and sailboat rigging. I could hear a boy’s voice calling: “Stuart! Renée! Abigail needs you!”

“That’s Winston,” Norma said. “He likes organizing things.”

I told the McArthurs what I needed, and they told me what they could provide. Across the lagoon formed by the outlet of a creek into something they called “The Cut,” Norma pointed out a cottage called “Nova” or was it “Scotia”? Here I could cook or not cook as it suited me. The main dining-room of the lodge, she explained, wasn’t open for the season yet. I took a look at the cabin, which was luxurious compared to what I had been expecting. The shingles on the roof were partly covered by fallen pine needles. I could imagine what the place must look like under the falling leaves around Thanksgiving. I made a mental note.

Chris helped me get my stuff from the car. He was amazed that the Olds was still holding together. I guess there aren’t many cars of that vintage still operating on the forty-fifth parallel. The bed was comfortable, the bathroom well appointed and in working order. Through my windows, I could see a rack of red canoes and kayaks of yellow and blue. There were paddleboats, and motorboats for the more ambitious. A cream-coloured float plane was moored to a dock just at the edge of my vision on the right. A Japanese-inspired bridge joined together the land cut in two by the lagoon-like harbour, which ran behind or in front of several of the cottages. I also had a clear view, not only of the lake, but also of a most inviting hammock strung between massive pines. I was beginning to like this job.

In the hammock, less than twenty minutes after signing in, and looking at my pale, bare toes, I opened the paperback I’d bought at Book City about Dermot Keogh. It was a slim volume with pictures reproduced from magazines and newspapers. It had the look of a book flung together in a hurry on a computer, or several computers, judging from the many changes in font. The author was described as “a sometime critic and music lover.” The chapters carved Keogh’s life into convenient phases. From childhood and youth, we went on to triumphs in London, Moscow and New York. I saved the part about his untimely death for later, like it was the icing from my birthday cake. I was beginning to feel guilty about the hammock. This Cooperman had no real aptitude for relaxation. I knew in my heart that I had to get back to work.

A plan began to form in my twisted little mind. I would locate, if I could, Vanessa’s cottage. Inside, I would try to find some proof that she had been there within the last two weeks or so. I’d question the neighbours, speak to the gas-station attendant and otherwise try to place my client away from Toronto on the date of Renata Sartori’s murder.

I drifted into a thoughtful reverie, and from there slid into something more dream-like. I was back in my car, driving through a pine forest, which surrendered to tundra and then to icefields. I kept checking the road-map to see whether I’d come too far. Whatever I saw on the map, it didn’t convince me to turn the car around. The icefields became a frozen river, the right of way marked out by empty oil drums. There was a shimmer to the ice and snow, and I couldn’t see the road properly even with sunglasses. There was no other traffic on the single track now over a bleak frozen lake. I tried to turn the car around and managed to get stuck in the slush and ice at the edge of the frozen highway.