Howard Engel - The Cooperman Variation

“If the equipment was rented from us,” he theorized, “then maybe we’ve got a record of which items went along with them to the dive site.” I gave him the date of the dive, which Fisher had mentioned, and he went to a log attached to a slanted desk, about chest high. It was mostly a record of reservations to rent and appointments for dives using McCordick boats, rafts and other equipment. He turned backwards from the half-filled page that was open, flipping back and back again towards the front of the book.

“Here it is,” said Stan with his finger in the middle of the page. “Yeah, it was quite an expedition: two rafts and four sets of wet suits and tanks. Mike, who was here then, wrote this. Mr. Keogh made the order, let’s see, three, no four days before. He was picking up the tab for everybody. Vern and Will McCordick thought the world of Mr. Keogh.”

“Who ended up paying? After the accident?”

“There’s a note written by Mike. ‘Paid by cheque: B. Foley.’”

“Bob Foley? Dermot’s man of all work. So, he was up here for the dive on Waome.”

“On most dives they take a crew of people to work the topside. If they had a boat and two rafts for four divers, one topside person would be the minimum. Two would be better. Let me see if I can get ol’ Mike on the phone. He’s waitering this summer at the King and Country. That’s a pub outside Port Carling.” Stan started on the phone, and I began examining swimming masks and fins, all of which were new to me. The marina carried professional equipment, with only a few items intended for small fry. I’d missed underwater sport when I was young enough to wear the equipment with no self-consciousness. The sun through the big window looking over the lake was lower than it had been, although I had been there only a short time. Its effect on the boats and wharves was still strong, daunting even. I could feel the sweat in the creases of my arms. I’d have to invest in sunblock, I promised myself.

Stan wasn’t gone long. When he came back, he said, “Bob Foley was Dermot’s chief boat wrangler on the Waome dive. The second person was Keogh’s girlfriend. Mike remembers her as a stunner. Says her name was Renata Bowmaker.”

“Are you sure about the last name?”

“That’s what the man said. He said that. Called her ‘my little Bowmaker.’”

“Good and thanks, Stan. Tell me, if I wanted to sabotage somebody’s dive, how would I go about doing it?”

“You planning to murder somebody?”

“Remember I told you I was a private investigator? What I didn’t tell you was that in my spare time-and there’s a lot of that-I write detective stories. On the side, you know. You may have seen some of my stories in Ellery Queen or Alfred Hitchcock . And there are the novels: Haste to the Gallows, The Glass Key, The Dalton Case, The Lake of Darkness …”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve seen some of them!” I was glad to see we were both liars of about equal skill.

“Well, in my new plot, the murderer wants to do away with his victim by tampering with his aqualung. I try to keep my fiction as close to the truth as possible. Is there some way that my murderer could alter the mechanism of an aqualung and get away with it? It can’t be something that the cops would find.”

“Yeah, yeah. I see the problem. Let me think. I guess he could fill the tanks with carbon monoxide.”

“Where would he get it?”

“Good point. The cops wouldn’t miss something like that. He could send him down in a tank that was nearly empty.”

“How can you tell the difference between a full and an empty tank?”

“A full tank is a lot heavier than an empty one. Air has weight. A lot of people forget about that.”

“But would you send out an empty tank from the marina?”

“Not on purpose. Or maybe the murderer opens the valve and lets the tank empty as he and his victim head for their dive site.”

“Wouldn’t that hiss? How could the heavy-the villain in my story-hold the tap open?”

“You’re right. It’s a demand valve, so that there’s no leakage from just having the main on/off tap open. Yeah, and an experienced diver would feel the difference in weight. Hey! What about this: your murderer could tamper with the O ring in the regulator.”

“The what?”

“The O ring is a black ring made from neoprene or hard plastic. It balances the intermediate pressure in the regulator. Yeah, you could do it with a screwdriver. You see, there’s a balance chamber in there. It prevents the diver getting air at a pressure that isn’t right for the depth he’s at. O rings wear out like anything else. If the cops looked at it, they might catch it, but again, they might not. It could look like ordinary wear and tear.”

“Does that mean I’ll have to make my murderer a marine engineer?”

“Naw. Anybody who can read a manual could do it. Wouldn’t take long either.”

“Could he do it with others around, say in the boat on the way to a dive?”

“Look, let me show you.” Here Stan gave me a lesson in the fine art of sabotaging a perfectly good aqualung. All in the aid of crime fiction. He was right. It wouldn’t have taken a man like Bob Foley more than a few minutes to “fix” Dermot’s tank. But how could he be sure that Dermot would use it and not one of the others? Stan had an answer for that too. Using the Waome dive as an example, he pointed out that Dermot always rented the same tanks. They were made of an ultralight alloy and not the usual steel. “Your fictional victim could use special tanks too.”

“Yeah!” I agreed. “That would make it easy.”

I promised Stan that I would remember him in the acknowledgements to my next book. Before I drove away, he asked for my autograph. I wrote Sheldon Zatz on the lined paper he held out to me.

“Could you make it ‘to Mike Coward,’ Mr. Zatz?”

“I thought your name was Stan?”

“It is. I was thinking of giving it to a friend. Is that okay?”

“Sure.”

“And didn’t you say your name was Cooperman?”

“That’s right. But I write my books using a pseudonym, a nom de plume . Got it?”

* * *

A charming waitress in a long skirt, obviously a student enjoying a working vacation in Muskoka, cleared away the wreckage of a dinner of ribs of beef and Yorkshire pudding from our table and carried it from the dimly lit patio and into the main building of the Inn at the Falls. We had been talking about all sorts of things, Peggy, Hamp and I. Hamp described his expedition to the Queen Elizabeth Islands to dive through the Arctic polar ice cap. “We were supposed to be testing winter equipment for the army,” he said, “but that didn’t stop us from having fun. You may have seen our pictures in National Geographic . It’s an eerie world under the ice, I don’t mind telling you.”

“That was Hamp’s second polar dive, Benny. He went the first time before we were married.”

“Peg, that was off Cape Hooker on Baffin Island the first time. Scarcely within the Arctic Circle. Last year’s trip took us-”

“Not me! I was in Arizona with Nic Cage and Michael Douglas,” corrected Peggy.

“Yes. Of course, dear. Aaron’s Run kept you busy for three months. By ‘we’ I meant ‘the expedition.’ This time we were off the Disraeli Fiord at the top end of Ellesmere Island. We were on the site for nearly a week.” I nodded my interest from time to time, turning my head back and forth. Finally, Hamp forced me to pull up my end of the conversation with an account of some of my cases, beginning with the one in Niagara Falls. When I’d finished with an exaggerated version of a case that took me into the north woods in search of an evangelist who had “disappeared,” I took a sip that emptied my glass of red wine. That was when Hamp outlined the case of an American explorer who died mysteriously in 1871 on a dash for the North Pole.