Howard Engel - The Cooperman Variation

A few minutes of this went by, with the professional questioner answering all of the questions, and the amateur resting his hands at the back of his head. At last, I placed my empty pop can in the barrel designated for bottles and cans and took my leave, jiggling the keys to Ed Patel’s place in my pocket as I headed up the trail a piece.

The road I followed from the parking lot was less than a road but more than a path. You could call it a lane. The trees arching down around me from above were very lane-like, and the twin ruts that made their parallel way through the bush were rather road-like, but the bumps, roots and outcroppings of rocky Precambrian Shield made it hard to imagine anything not on tank tracks making its way up and down this stretch of whatever it was. The birds didn’t seem to mind it. Animals kept me company, just beyond my actually seeing them. I could hear them all right, off in the bracken or among the trees, and the sounds were scaled small enough so that only once or twice did I think I might be in trouble from a man-eating chipmunk or a rogue rabbit.

The trail led through a grove of dense white pine. It must have been second growth, but it looked substantial, even commercial. My path ended, to my complete surprise, at the back end of a beautiful, dark blue, antique Bentley. I nearly fell down and worshipped. It was sheltered under a rustic lean-to with a covering that was half canvas and half blue plastic. I would have been less surprised to have found a sleigh and eight tiny reindeer. But, on reflection, I thought I a m less than a few hundred metres, as the trout swims, from Millionaires’ Row. I shouldn’t be surprised at anything seen in these latitudes.

The cottage, painted a forest green, lay just beyond the lean-to. Like Vanessa’s, it was screened in along three sides, which tended to show the varmints out there who was boss. The key I’d taken from Vanessa’s kitchen turned smoothly in the Yale lock, and I found myself in a brand new way to define what a Muskoka cottage ought to be. There were only four rooms, two of them bedrooms. The kitchen, a dark, gloomy hole, had been added as an afterthought, but it had made up for that in being used to capacity. There were signs of years of cooking at high temperatures. Under the counter I found gadgets for storing pot lids and drying tea-towels. Out a rear door, I found large cooking pans that had been placed outside possibly for the wildlife. I could imagine that a family of raccoons licked many a platter clean of congealed or carbonized fat and grease.

The biggest room was a comfortable one, filled with wicker easy chairs, couches and low rattan tables. The small shelf of books was dedicated to old law reports and to ancient novels of the Book of the Month Club, featuring Forever Amber, Leave Her to Heaven and The Sun Is My Undoing . A couple of philosophical volumes such as Meetings with Remarkable Men , by G.I. Gurdjieff. There were a few others, more modest in size, written in Hindi or Urdu, featuring blue-faced ladies serving platters of sweetmeats to lounging young men wearing robes of office or of pleasure. The focus of the room was a fieldstone fireplace of monumental proportions. The large opening was buttressed by a pair of massive andirons. The ashes from the most recent fire were cold; the remaining scrap of newspaper that I found bore no date. So much for detection, I thought. And what was I doing here anyway? Ed Patel wasn’t a suspect. Did I still hope to find a gas receipt with Vanessa’s signature on it? And why here? Just because Vanessa had keys to the house? Patel’s name had come up too often and from too many directions for me to ignore it without losing sleep. Vanessa knew him. Jesse, the technician, said that Foley knew him. One likes to be thorough, I muttered through clenched teeth.

I stood up and heard the snap of my knees. A familiar voice whispered his familiar refrain in my inner ear all about age and futility. This fireplace was as free of clues as Vanessa’s across the lake. I cursed the fireplace silently as I steadied myself on the rough wooden floor. But then I smiled. My powers were more acute than I realized: above the fireplace hung an old gun. It was a shotgun of some kind. Twelve gauge, I thought. At that point I felt an itch at the back of my knees that has been in the past, if not infallible, at least a fair guide to what was going on. I was suspicious enough to look for something that might not smudge fingerprints if there were any. A plastic shopping bag served the purpose very well. I took the gun off the wall, keeping the plastic between me and the gun. A dog owner would recognize it as a variation on pooping and scooping. I smelled the twin barrels. They smelled like the barrels of a shotgun. I couldn’t tell whether it had just been fired or if it fired the last shot in the First World War. Certainly, it looked old enough to have been fired in that war, if shotguns weren’t banned by international agreement.

Since I needed a bigger plastic bag than the one I’d first hit upon, I looked into a low cupboard to the right of the fireplace. In addition to a big Mountain Co-op bag, I discovered an old cardboard box containing eight live shells for the gun. It had originally held twice that many. I slipped the gun into the larger bag, and slipped the box of shells into the one I’d been using instead of rubber gloves. As I brandished these trophies, I thought, These might earn me some slack with the Toronto cops. They couldn’t throw me out on my ear if I handed them the murder weapon, now, could they? Of course, maybe Muskoka cottages abound in displayed firearms. I don’t know. I’d have to wait to see whether their eyes lit up when the tests came back from the Forensic Centre.

Beyond the gun, I didn’t find much of interest in Ed Patel’s cottage. I saw where he kept his car keys. I found another set with the name Dermot Keogh on a piece of cardboard attached by a string. What were they doing there? I wondered, as I wandered from one of the bedrooms into the other. Patel was a lawyer before he took sick, wasn’t he? I tried to remember. Offices in three towns to begin with, now dwindled down to one. I decided that I might remember better if I stretched out on one of the beds and closed my eyes for ten minutes. I did that. Then I kept them closed for another twenty minutes, and awakened with a start when a clock in the big room went off, sounding the hour, which was just four o’clock when I checked it with my watch.

I felt better for the nap and closed up the cottage, taking my pieces of evidence with me through the bush back along the path to the marina parking lot and my car. Ifor Evans wouldn’t hear of my paying him for the use of the canoe, and I left the marina promising to see him again before the summer was over. Driving back to the lodge, I decided on a detour to Bracebridge to buy a bathing suit. I had been moving around this planet without one for several years and I thought it was time to end that situation. The huge shopping malls on the highway going into Bracebridge swelled with promise under the afternoon sun. My greed for camping stoves, jackknives, sleeping bags and tents was tested by the reality that these delightful objects were all too readily at hand. I only hoped the stores contained the solution to my more modest request, a bathing suit in my size.

The parking lots on both sides of the road were nearly full. Business was good for Canadian Tire, the beer and liquor stores and the supermarket. I found a pair of black trunks, paid for them and wandered out on the steaming asphalt grinning to myself. I liked swimming, but I hardly ever made the opportunity.

“Pistachio!”

“Huh?” I looked in the direction of the voice. A pretty woman was walking towards me. Her smile opened out and overwhelmed me. There’s only one person who calls me that.