The Cooperman Variation

FOURTEEN

Hamp Fisher’s account of the death of Dermot Keogh quite dampened conversation for a good ten minutes after he finished. While looking at the wooded headlands alongside Wanda III, I thought of Wally Skeat, the Grantham TV broadcaster, from whom I’d first heard the name of the cellist at the end of April, the first anniversary of his death. I watched Hamp as he refilled my glass. I watched him with Peggy and got a good sense of their relationship through small things like the way he refreshed her drink and cleared away crumbs on the sundappled table with his napkin. Small things, but they penetrated to the heart of his affection for her. Peggy remained a little aloof from this, but I didn’t doubt her attachment to him. Again it was little things: when he pulled on a sweater, the way she tucked the label in at the back.

It was a big, comfortable navy blue sweater from Cornwall. I saw that much before the white tag was tidied away. I was wishing that I had brought something warm with me. A rank of dark clouds had come between us and the sun. It looked temporary, but my shoulders and back felt the chill. I began rubbing my elbows, I thought with some subtlety, but Peggy got up and returned with a white Aran sweater and another for herself.

“You mentioned the two divers who went down to the wreck with you and Mr. Keogh. Were many of his friends chosen as casually? I gather that they went on the fatal dive simply because they were in the right place at the right time.”

“What you say was certainly true of them. They just happened to be passing through. Diving that early in the year doesn’t often find dozens of enthusiasts to choose among. But, in general, you’re right too. Lots of Dermot’s friends were just ordinary people he happened to like.”

“Oh, Hamp, Dermot had other kinds of friends too. There were people he met at NTC and from Sony in the States, sure, but there were other musician friends, architects, painters, horse-breeders-you name it. But, usually they came up later in the year. About this time. Just when the weather is perfect and the last thing you want to think of is a sound stage.”

“What people from NTC?” I asked.

“There was quite a colony here last year and the year before that.” Hamp covered his chin with both hands, as though that helped him to see the faces from those vanished summers. “Let’s see, let’s see.”

“Philip Rankin came up a lot our first summer, although we didn’t see much of him.” Peggy was adding a plastic nose guard to her sunglasses. “He says he’s allergic to the sun.”

“Yes, and Ken Trebitsch comes up regularly. He rebuilt an old boathouse and lives above a small fleet. Remember, he introduced that lawyer, Ray Devlin. Dermot took quite a shine to Devlin. In the end it worked out to be an important relationship. Devlin’s firm handled all of Dermot’s contracts in the U.S. and in Canada. Eventually, Ray designed Dermot’s will.”

“When would that have been?”

“Oh, well before the spring three years back, I’d say. Yes, Ray was on the scene quite a bit then, but not here the following summer. Old Evans at the marina thought Rankin and Devlin should be banned from operating boats on the lake.”

“Oh, Hamp, Ray was lots of fun, once you got him to shed that bogus courtroom manner of his. You couldn’t ask him to pass the salt at first without being crossexamined.” We laughed at that.

“Yes,” Hamp said, nodding his head. “We missed him the summer before last. He wasn’t around really. There are always other people. One forgets. I will say this, Dermot thought him a very likeable chap.”

“But you didn’t warm to him, Hamp?”

“Me? Oh, I’m still a bit stand-offish, you know. Habit of a lifetime. I have to work at it. I work hard, and I’ve got a good teacher.” Peggy took Hamp’s hand. They smiled at one another and then both, a bit sheepishly, at me.

“We thought we’d drive to the Inn at the Falls for dinner, Benny. I hope that you’ll be able to join us.” I tried to make an excuse, but it was torn away before I’d fixed it firmly to the mast. Hamp knew that the kitchen at Norchris Lodge wasn’t in operation yet and that if I wasn’t going to eat with them, it was because I’d chosen to eat elsewhere alone. When he put it like that, I accepted. What else could I do?

But first, we returned to the cottage. “Cottage” isn’t really an adequate word for this mansion in the woods. It was made of squared logs with fieldstone and other masonry at strategic intervals. The massive fireplace had openings in four rooms. The interior was simply furnished except when you examined the pine closely and discovered that even the kitchen chairs were Early Canadian antiques. While wandering about on my own, according to my hosts’ invitation, I discovered a series of rooms in the back. They were filled with electronic equipment — phones, fax machines, computers, e-mail, the Internet-all manned by three men in shorts and T-shirts. Hamp’s empire was awake and active, even while Hamp was cruising in Wanda III.

After a swim, the inaugural swim in my new suit, off Peggy and Hamp’s dock, I opened the Dermot Keogh book where I’d folded down the page. I let the strong, late-afternoon sun dry me as I half-dozed on a white deck chair. Later, as soon as I’d showered and dressed, I excused myself for an hour or two while they read or napped. I told them I was going off to “explore.” I didn’t know exactly what I was going to explore, but I was feeling a growing connection between pieces of what I had been learning up here. It was the sort of exploration I had to do, or I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I’d been there before. There may have been no connection between the deaths I was hearing about, but I knew I had to exhaust the possibility. Peggy offered me a butterfly net to aid me in my great work. More practically, Hamp let me borrow his sleek black BMW, since my car was still back in town.

The marina in Bala was less rustic than Ifor Evans’s establishment on Segwin Bay. The paint on the clapboard siding was fresher, the sheds for stored boats looked more permanent. It was the same lake, of course, but the highway passing through Bala carried more traffic. A large sign advertising a big American-built outboard motor dominated the cedar-shingled roof of the boathouse. It eclipsed the older and much more modest sign: McCordick Brothers’ Marina. There were extensive docking wharves, most of them empty on this sunny afternoon. There was a sense of languid bustle, of sun-fried picnic hampers, of children smeared with sunblock, of orange life preservers and of the faint smell of gasoline on the wind. Sun reflected from glass, chrome and water as the remaining flotilla in the slips moved with the breeze off the lake, metal rings sounding musically on the tall masts. I parked where Hamp’s car could be seen and walked into that back part of the marina sacred to scuba diving. Here were tanks and suits, regulators, masks, fins and other paraphernalia of the deep. I asked a sunbleached blond kid in cut-off jeans who was in charge of the underwater gear.

“I’ll get Stan,” he said, and off he went like Peter Rabbit through a cabbage patch. He didn’t come back, but he sent along a lean six-footer in a white T-shirt with the printed slogan “Charles Wells, premium bitter” sitting over his heart. He was tanned all over, as far as I could see. From the look of him, you’d have thought the McCordicks would put him on the pink cabin-cruiser runabout detail. He couldn’t miss with the ladies.

I was frank with him to start with; gave him my name and calling. What the hell, I thought, maybe he’ll enter into the spirit of my investigation. I gave him a short version of what Hamp Fisher had told me about the dive to the S.S. Waome a year ago. He remembered the whole thing, of course, from the coming of the Provincial Police to the exit of the reporters and TV trucks. Stan relived the event as he’d experienced it, and, what the hell, I let him. Then he asked me some good questions, which I tried to answer precisely.

“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.

“It was a badly run show from start to finish. Lots of fights and rows. The leader’s body was exhumed from the permafrost nearly one hundred years later. It was perfectly preserved, of course. The body proved to be full of arsenic. Now there’s a puzzle for your enquiring mind, Ben.”

“In history, everybody was poisoned by arsenic,” I said, remembering something from a few years ago. “Take Napoleon.”

“Yes! A very interesting case!” said Hamp, shortly before Peggy excused herself to walk down to see the falls before the light was gone. That killed it. And about time too. There is something about Napoleon that either turns you on or turns you off. There’s no middle ground. We got up after a few minutes and, at a distance, followed Peggy down the steep and twisting path to the river. On the way, he quizzed me about the investigation. I talked as we walked.

“A vexing case, I’d say,” Hamp said, his hands thrust deeply into his pockets. “A veritable three-pipe problem.”

“Excuse me?” Hamp waved his hand to show that it wasn’t important.

“May I ask who keeps you informed, Hamp?” I was tempted to call him “mister,” since the familiarity, which worked quite well with dinner, had now hardened into the old routine of my being professionally nosey.

“Ted Thornhill is my main source, but there are others too. I’d prefer to keep their names to myself, if you don’t mind. Unless it becomes important later on, I mean.”

“Not at all. Can you tell me how Vanessa Moss came to NTC? She seems to have collected a number of business rivals and, well, enemies since she arrived. I don’t know whether any of them would try to advance himself over her dead body or try to remove her opposition to dividing up her empire.”

“You think that her enemies are that dedicated?”

“Well, at least one of them could be. As you know, someone shot and killed Renata Sartori. She was staying in Vanessa’s house, wearing her dressing gown.”

“Yes, I see. I see. I don’t know quite what to say to you, Benny. I first heard of Vanessa Moss a little over a year ago. She was still with CBC then. Her name came up twice in two separate meetings. Same day. I mentioned this to Ted Thornhill as a curiosity. Nothing more. A few weeks later, I heard from Ted that he was negotiating with the CBC to buy up her remaining contract.”

“I know you’re not kidding.”

“No, I’m not. Ted should have been warned by the eagerness with which the CBC entered into negotiations. I try not to meddle at that level. People learn from their mistakes. Perhaps I’m a teacher at heart. Although what I could teach Ted Thornhill about bad decisions is moot.”

“Why do you keep him on, then?”

“He is just that much better than his nearest rival. I swallow his imperfections. He’ll do until another comes along. People are so ambitious, Benny, they unmask themselves. No eighteenth-century French court official ever got more mail from the colonies than I get from ambitious time-servers at NTC. I hear about their rivals’ stupidity, their duplicity, their petty dishonesties, their ignorance. Oh, don’t get me started. I am sometimes forced to promote liars and swindlers to high positions, Benny, simply because the alternatives are even more disastrous. I’ll leave you to imagine the rest.”

We had come to the riverbank, where the Muskoka River ran swift and black in front of us. Peggy had walked to her left, upstream and under a series of high bridges that criss-crossed the river at the waterfall. The sinking sun caught Peggy’s silhouette as she traced the edge of the stream back to the falls, which could now be heard more and more clearly.

“She’s lovely, isn’t she?” Hamp Fisher said out loud.

I wasn’t sure whether it was meant for my ears or not. I took a chance: “Yes, I’ve always thought so.”