The Cooperman Variation

ONE

Tuesday in April

I should have seen the writing on the wall. It was writ large, as my friend Dr. Frank Bushmill says. “You have to pay attention to the signs and portents, Benny,” he says, and he should know. Frank has remade his life a couple of times based on his reading of the signs. How he rejected his well-to-do family, abandoned a promising career at Trinity College, cleared out of Dublin and came to live here is a history of a man who won’t take “yes” for an answer.

The first sign, which I ignored, was the closing of the United Cigar Store, which cut me off from my usual lunch counter. Then the other places along St. Andrew and James streets, the Columbia and the Crystal, where I used to go for coffee and meals, went out of business or changed beyond recognition. Then the thunderbolt: a few weeks ago the Diana Sweets went broke. Not only did the Di close for business, but one night some enterprising wiseguy with a truck took all the tables, booths and mirrored cherrywood walls off to some location across the Niagara River. Here, the Di will be recreated for trendy diners in the great Empire State of New York as an evocation of the 1930s. A couple of irate citizens asked me to try to trace the Di, but even with all my experience as a private investigator I never had much luck in tracing people, let alone restaurant interiors.

Out on the street, where a nippy April wind cut up the sidewalk, lifting shreds of green garbage bags and pasting them against the bricks of Helliwell Lane, I ran into Wally Skeat from the radio station.

“Benny Cooperman! As I live and breathe.”

“Hi, Wally.” Wally’s street voice sounded almost human. But once he got his hand cupped behind his ear in front of a microphone in the studio, he treated you to his bell-cracking lower register.

“You hunting for your morning coffee, Wally?” Wally kept getting hired by bigger and bigger TV stations. He disappeared for a year or two, and then turned up in Grantham again doing the early-morning news on the radio. Somehow Wally and the Big Time were never on speaking terms for long.

“Yeah. You too? I’ve been up since they called me in at six to do a backgrounder on that rap singer who was arrested. I thought I’d done my bit with the anniversary piece on Dermot Keogh.”

“Who?”

“Cellist. Very big with the long-haired CD crowd. Died a year ago, but still bigger than Big.”

“Never heard of him. Should I have?”

“Cooperman, you live with your head under the covers. Keogh’s more famous in death than he ever was in life. You may quote me on that.” I assured him I would, but my curiosity had been aroused. I’m always trying to patch my ignorance.

“What did he die of, Wally?”

“He drowned. Up north. Swimming. Far from the world’s concert halls.” Wally cast a wounded eye at the locked and barred door of the Di. Wally’s shoulders were fragile and defeated. If I blew, he’d melt.

“So you were writing up his death a year after the event?”

“People are still buying his records, Benny. It’s crazy. He’s as dead as the Diana Sweets, but he keeps on making money. Hell, I made a few bucks off him this morning. Maybe you’ll have a go this afternoon. Maybe you could prove he was murdered, Benny. There might be a dollar or two in that.” Wally was not at his best when he tried to be sarcastic. I put it down to our common need for caffeine. He seemed lost without the Di to dive into for his morning fix. He twitched the collar of his coat, and passed his briefcase from one hand to the other. He looked me hard in the eye as though I was to blame. In Grantham, Ontario, Canada, we took our routines seriously. He moved on down St. Andrew Street, muttering.

I had seen the same lost look on the faces of all the reporters from the Beacon who used to work with their cellphones at one of the Di’s back tables. Bankers and lawyers were equally glassy-eyed as they stared at the locked front door, the naked interior masked with strips of newspaper over the windows. There was no easy equivalent to the Di; no obvious replacement. It was what we had instead of a town pump. This is where the gossip was retailed, the deals made, the plots plotted. It was central to the city’s nervous system. The Di provided a sort of community dialysis-it laundered information and passed it on. Gossip is the life-blood of a town like ours. Until four weeks ago, most of it moved in and out of the now-closed door in the middle of the block down the street from my office.

When the Di closed, I should have known it was time for a change. Did I intend to be the last business to abandon St. Andrew Street? What I needed, my friend and neighbour Frank Bushmill told me, was a change, a chance to rethink what I thought I was doing. Did I plan to die of old age after getting a chill standing in the rain trying to take a picture of an adulterous couple through a window of the Black Duck Motel on Old Number Eight? If I was going to die in harness, why should it be this harness? Did I want to give up and let younger men sweep me away with their body-mounted surveillance equipment? Why not? It was God’s truth that I wasn’t wired. In ten years in the business of following wives and husbands, tracing credit-card trails and even solving the odd murder case, I used sophisticated recording equipment only once, and I had to stand in the rain reading the instructions before I could turn the damned thing on. Collected an electric shock for my trouble. On the floor of my office stood a pile of computer components that had been given to me by various well-meaning friends: “This will simplify your life, Benny. You’ll love it. It will put you in touch with the whole world.” To cobble these elements together, I called upon a so-called computer guru, whose name I found in the Yellow Pages, after I found the right volume. (Even the Yellow Pages aren’t as simple as they used to be.) The guru took four hundred dollars of my money to patch a few wires into sockets I hadn’t tried yet and went away pleased with himself. From all those pieces, I still couldn’t get a combination that simplified my life. I didn’t love it. I was still not in touch with the world. After buying enough computer books to test the strength of my floor, I discovered that I was incapable of learning a new way of thinking. I got to hate the cheery, well-intentioned, yellow-and-blackcovered books. They’ll have to come up with something even dumber.

The computer nightmare quickly led to the Internet nightmare, about which I am not yet ready to speak. Far from “surfing the net,” I was sinking like that English poet off the coast of Italy. Not Byron. What’s his name?

“In life, boyo, you have to give yourself a break. Life itself won’t do it.” Frank was talking to me in his waiting room after the last of his patients hobbled down the stairs. A friend of long standing, Frank called himself a podiatrist. The sign outside still read “chiropodist.” Go figure. We maintained offices on St. Andrew Street, shared the same floor and bathroom in what was now known as “The Kogan Block.”

“When was the last time you had a holiday at all, Benny? Think now. Can you remember that far back?”

“I was in Toronto house-sitting for my brother a year ago.”

“A year ago! How are you?”

“Well … maybe longer than a year. I went to Vegas with a couple of the boys once.”

“That was two years ago, Benny. I remember because you needed a loan to renew your detective licence when you got back.”

“Investigator. Private investigator. Was it really two years?”

“You see? You need to get away, see the world, forge something or other in the smithy of your soul. You’re not getting any younger. And besides, isn’t Anna going to be at some European university this year? Think about that?”

“Frank, you’re the devil whispering into my ear. Of course, I’d love to get away. I like to have fun same as the next man, but, Frank, I’ve got responsibilities.”

“Such as?”

“Such as my parents.”

“They go to Florida for three months every winter.”

“Well, who’s going to look after their house? water their plants? They wouldn’t want to trust that to a stranger.”

“Benny, your parents got back from Florida three weeks ago. Let’s keep the discussion relevant.”

“So, now I have to drop in to see them every couple of days.”

“What happens if you don’t?”

“I’ve never tried that.” Frank went to a cupboard and took out a bottle with his name on the label. He poured out two shots into the two glasses he kept for special occasions.

Frank was a sad character. He had helped me with a couple of my cases, but he remained a glum sort of Dubliner. An exile. With him came bad weather. He had known the writer Flann O’Brien in his younger days and got me reading him-which was a change from the Russians I was always nodding over.

“Frank, are you happy here?” He took a sip of the whiskey and looked out the windows.

“Benny, I’m different. I’m a hopeless case. I was a graduate student at Trinity when religious toleration was still incomplete. You see, I’ve been on the barricades, as it were, since I was in my teens.”

“Are you saying that you peaked too early?”

“Maybe I am and maybe I’m not. But I find this a peaceable place, this town. It’s like a fine, handsome head without an idea in it. And Ireland is an ugly witch of a shrunken head with ideas skyrocketing out her eyes and ears. It’s a tree full of singing birds and a nest of stinging nettles. I’m a bit of a loser, you know. But that’s not to be helped. Blame it on the steady approach of winter.”

“But, Frank, it’s April! April?” I had a sudden irrelevant thought: “What was that fiddler doing swimming in April?”

“What fiddler?”

“Dur-something Keogh. He drowned. Maybe it was down south. Florida’s a good place to drown. No. I remember now: Wally said it happened up north.”

“Dermot Keogh. Fiddler you call him? Damned fine cellist is what he was, Benny. I heard him once. God love me, that man could play!”

“Wally Skeat just wrote an anniversary piece about it.”

“That was a damned bloody shame, that was.”

“Tell me about him, Frank.”

“Stop trying to change the subject. Never mind about poor Keogh. He’s a year into eternity. It’s not much, but it’s a start. More to the point, boyo, you don’t have to worry about your parents’ house right now. They’re back from Miami.”

“I’m afraid of Ma’s unspoken disapproval, Frank. She wouldn’t say a word and the silence would kill me.” He shook his head and for a minute I said nothing.

Frank Bushmill, as everybody knew, was gay. And a great reader; an educated man in a lunch-bucket town. I used to hope that he could go off and enjoy himself with his own kind, but Frank was unique. There wasn’t anyone else quite like him. Oh, there were others of his ilk around, but Frank was either too fastidious, too shy or too cautious to get far in the local gay community. I once thought that in Grantham Frank was the gay community. Anyway, he blunted the edges of his lusts with Bushmills Old Bush, or any good single malt whiskey. He spent the worst of his drinking nights on the couch in his office, and appeared with dark-stained eyes the following morning. Despite this frailty, he had done battle on my behalf more than once. He had taken a few wallops on his head in my service, as he never tired of telling me. So, I mostly ignored what he called his “still small vice.”

“Benny, we are different. You and me. I’m never going to light up the sky. I don’t much care about it if I do or if I don’t. But you, you’re younger, and you’ve never been off the leash. Time to break the silver cord. You should think about that, Benny. You’ll be an old man before you know it.”

I nodded my head as though I agreed with him. In part, I did agree with him, but I had a stubborn streak in me that kept me tied to the places I knew best. I didn’t even enjoy reading the travel pages in the Beacon or the Globe. They made me car sick.

I didn’t give Frank Bushmill a straight answer, but I had to admit that he had planted seeds in my mind and watered them with the care of my own good mother. I pondered the idea as I wandered the chilly street and looked for a restaurant that I might blight into insolvency merely by going in and sitting down. Indeed, as Frank once said, it was an incredible power I had.

I should have seen the writing on the wall.