Howard Engel - The Cooperman Variation

“Pistachio! Don’t you remember me?” My mind was still churning, trying to fit the memory into the right channel. By now she was stopping in front of me, blonde and, well, beautiful. In a moment, the smile would begin to lose its lustre if I didn’t show signs of recognition. She took off the large sunglasses so I could see her eyes.

“Peggy!” I said, the thing hitting me at the last possible moment. “Peggy O’Toole! How are you?” It was my dear Peggy from the case I’d helped work on in Niagara Falls some years ago. I’d hoped to run into her, but since the great north woods don’t work the way streets in Grantham do, I’d pretty well given up any hope of running into her at the intersection of Beaver Meadow and Muskrat.

“Gosh, Benny, it’s so good to see you! I can’t get over it. You remembered me! I was just a little girl when you saw me last. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about all that time that’s gone. Remember? Niagara Falls and all the trouble we had making Ice Bridge with Mr. Sayre. You remember Jim Sayre , I hope? The director? He, Mr. Sayre, is coming up to see us this summer, Benny. Will he be surprised to see you!”

“I hope I’m still around, but it looks-”

“You’ll just have to be around. You’re family , Benny. Even if we hardly ever see you. Even my mother asks about you. And Mr. Sayre, why he thinks … You look wonderful, Benny!”

“You look wonderful yourself, Peggy.”

“Go on. In this light? I look … well, frankly, I don’t care how I look. Gosh it’s good to see you!”

“You’ve grown up fine, Peggy. I’ve even followed your career. I boasted to my mother that I knew you when.”

“What did she say?”

“She reminded me of when my father sold his original shares of IBM. I guess she thinks I let you get away.”

“You’ll never get away from me, Pistachio. You can tell her that from me. But, what are you doing here? You can’t be working on a case. Not here.”

“You’d be surprised. I’m only here for another-”

“Benny. What are you doing now? Right now?”

“I’m talking to-”

“I don’t mean that. You have to meet Hamp! You’ve never met him, and I’ve been talking to him about you for years. My God! Is it ten years?” It was more than ten, but I wasn’t going to tell her. The years had been good to her. She not only looked as lovely as she is in the movies, but she even looked happy. I was glad of that, because I remembered her as a troubled young woman when we’d first met. But that was before her marriage to Hamp Fisher and all of his eccentricities.

The upshot of the conversation in the parking lot was a short walk from where I’d parked my car, following the white wraparound hem of Peggy’s skirt to where she’d parked her Range Rover. It was like Vanessa all over again. In no time, together with my newly purchased bathing suit, I was sitting beside Peggy as she shifted her gears up and down the highway that ran from Bracebridge to her cottage somewhere beyond the point where I’d earlier turned off the road to Evans’s Marina. Only about half of her gear changes were absolutely necessary, but it was nice to see that she took her driving seriously. There was also a fair amount of Peggy’s tanned legs visible as she managed the gears and adjusted the outside mirrors on both sides of us. Further, there was a kind of paralysis in my breathing when she turned to check the road behind her for rivals to her mastery of the road. The strain on her buttons tweaked my masculinity by its nose, or something. I was feeling guilty about looking, since I’d just been made a member of the family circle, but my hormones are always speaking out of turn. They have no sense of decorum. I sometimes think that my sexuality is like having an idiot brother who follows me around. I make excuses for him, I apologize for him, but there he sits, drooling. I try to ignore him, attempt to engage the female of my acquaintance in elevated chat, but his demented leer gets in the way when she so much as breathes or leans over to improve the position of the Rover’s floor mat. He is so incorrigible at times, I’ve considered sending him away, but most of the time I think with kindness and understanding he can still be managed at home.

An hour later, I was aboard Wanda III , taking a short spin around Lake Muskoka. Well, not really a spin. Wanda III doesn’t spin. She’s a lady, and she takes things more calmly than the powerboats and motor launches we could see coming up and down a narrows on our right.

“This is Millionaires’ Row,” Hamp said, pointing at the huge summer homes of the wealthy of another age. I tried to remember what Norma McArthur had told me about Millionaires’ Row back at the lodge. Funny that Hamp should be pointing it out. His cottage was as large and as impressive as any of these hundred-year-old follies. “That’s where Sir John Craig Eaton built his summer house. He kept the lawn in front cut as though he were in the city. Over there, behind the white boathouse, lived Sir Wilfred Chambers. I hear that he had to blast away a small mountain to put in a tennis court back in the 1920s. Next to it, with the green gingerbread, is the house of Ettie Cohen. You know, the Titanic survivor? Ettie went into a lifeboat only when Captain Smith insisted. She wrote a book about it. This place was built for her by an admirer from Seattle. Lumber baron. Now look up on the hill beyond the point. There’s the place where General Fields, the breakfast cereal man, and the heiress of his chief rival built a secret love nest with twenty rooms. They thought nobody up here in Canada would know that they were not-what’s the phrase? — legally united.”

I remembered hearing that Hampton Fisher was a bit of a prude years ago. He was a lot of other things too, including being the closest thing to a genius to enter the boardrooms of newspapers he controlled. He had always been a paradox: a guy who hated germs and shunned society, but who went swimming under the polar ice cap and climbing in the Himalayas. I remembered that Vanessa had told me he set up the NTC network himself and still owned a controlling share of the voting stock. Years ago in the Falls, I never got a good look at him because he never went out. Once, I was watching Peggy shoot a scene in front of the American Falls. When I turned around and looked up, there was Hamp Fisher watching the same thing from his penthouse balcony. It struck me then as a little eerie, but I could never figure out why.

Fisher had aged well. His hair was too long for a boardroom. Still, the grey temples reminded me of the old “Men of Distinction” ads I’d seen in ancient magazines in people’s summer cottages. His yachting outfit was immaculate too, like another page in the same old magazines, but he brought the effect off with panache. He didn’t look as though he had his drinking water flown in from California any longer. Maybe he never had. At the moment, he and Peggy were sitting together in white wicker chairs, like the one I was sitting in, at the rail of Wanda III . We were shaded from the afternoon sun by a canvas cover of stretched blue duck, through which Wanda’ s smoke stack protruded into the air. We were in the open air, too, of course, sipping drinks from a table set up aft of the funnel. Hamp was drinking Perrier, Peggy, coffee from a tall silver Thermos, and I, ginger ale in a crystal tumbler with the name of the ship embossed in the glass. There were others aboard, too, although I had only seen one of them when I came up the gangplank.

After hearing about the rich and famous of Millionaires’ Row, I heard about how they loved Muskoka, how they were thinking of building a cottage when the lease on the one they had expired. Hamp made an attempt or two at asking me about me, but I couldn’t get up enough steam. Peggy kept interrupting me and buttering up my past. She kept quizzing me about the case I was working on. After a while, I sketched it in for them in broad outline. Of course both had heard about the murder, and Hamp knew the people at NTC. Peggy recognized the parallels with the movie Laura , and moving to it was as good a way as any to get away from the more obscure facts of my investigation. Peggy launched into an appreciation of the face structure of Gene Tierney. “It’s her jaw, really. Any good orthodontist could have spoiled all that.”