The Cooperman Variations (6 page)

I had never visited 52 Division, City of Toronto Police, before. I was impressed by the brightness of the place: lots of glass and windows and overhead lighting. Glass brick from the sixties or earlier. The man at the reception desk looked more like a hotel clerk than a desk sergeant. I told him that I wanted to see Staff Sergeant Jack Sykes, who was in charge of the Renata Sartori case. I had my name taken and was shown where I could sit down and wait.

I had not researched many of last year’s periodicals when I heard my name called in a brisk, metallic voice. I closed the magazine, immediately forgot what I had been reading in it and got to my feet. Watching me was a body that could have belonged only to a big-city policeman. He stood six foot two and was carrying about seventy pounds of extra weight around his waist, which even a heavy belt couldn’t disguise. This effect was strengthened by his narrow hips and tiny butt. His hair was straight and sandy, tending to fall across his right eye. Blue eyes and a firm jaw set in a ruddy face completed the first impression. He held out his hand and showed a double row of even, friendly teeth.

“Mr. Cooperman. Glad you dropped in.”

“Staff Sergeant Sykes?” I asked.

“Boyd,” he said and amended it to “James Boyd,” giving me the feeling I’d heard the combination before. “Jack’s on the phone; with luck he may be finished by the time we get there.” He turned and left the reception area without looking over his shoulder. I followed him to a room at the back without getting a glimpse of holding cells or suspects in handcuffs. It must have been a slow day.

Sykes’s door stood open. He was leaning back in a swivel chair, in some danger of overbalancing. He was still on the phone, but waved James Boyd and me into the room. In front of him lay a thick Toronto phone book, with “VICE” written in felt pen along the open edge. The desk was a mess of paper. I liked him already.

“… Go look it up in the transcript of the trial. Don’t ask me. Listen, Sheldon, I’m a working stiff, okay? Why don’t you go down to the Police Museum and talk to Les Mayhew. He knows all that ancient stuff. He was
there
, which I wasn’t.” He cupped his hand over the phone and said he’d be with us in a minute. I could see that he had long ago grown tired of this call. “Sheldon, you get credit on the cover for writing your books, right? In your past three books did I see a word about the time I’ve given you? What I’m saying is go write your book. I told you all I know about the case.” There was a long pause, while Sheldon tried to pin him to the line for another minute. Sykes held the phone away from his ear and sipped cold coffee from a cardboard container. When the dregs had gone, he interrupted his caller: “Sheldon, buy me lunch next week and I might remember something new, but right now your time is up. I got a desk full of problems and that’s what I’m being paid for … Sheldon! … Shut up, Sheldon! Call me at home … Mr. Zatz, here’s how it is: I’m busy Tuesday next week and Friday, but lunch is clear on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. I gotta go.” He banged down the phone and swivelled straight in his chair.

“Never agree to sit on a panel with writers. They get your name and you never breathe an easy breath again.” Boyd sat down and I took the chair he’d left for me. I presented my warrant card to him, which he assessed, nodding. He passed it across the desk to Sykes, who let it sit there without picking it up. Sykes was a big man too, but he handled the belly weight better than his partner. His muscles hadn’t begun their migration towards fat yet and he looked like he could throw me across the room if I asked him to help with a little plotting problem I was having. There was a patch of red fuzz above his forehead where his hair should have been. It looked like a dying plant in a shining vase. He was wearing a blue suit that had been tailored by a computer program that misfired. His tie looked like an enlarged tongue lolling on the right side of his green shirt. I figured that he was colour-blind and living alone. He didn’t say anything for a moment as he settled his hands behind his neck and relaxed back in his chair. The chair wheezed like an expiring sea lion. I wondered why he’d bothered to take his hat off. Except for that, Sykes looked like a movie cop from the 1940s. Something out of Hammett or Chandler, Leonard or Ellroy.

“So, you’re Cooperman,” he said at length, disappointing me with the clichéd introduction. Sheldon Zatz, whoever he was, was on to something in Sykes. You could fill up a lot of pages just describing the way he sat there drinking his cold coffee. I nodded and showed some teeth.

“And you’re in charge of the Sartori case,” I said, moving things in the direction of my preoccupations.

He said nothing, but he was running me through his assessment apparatus. I could imagine him sucking a toothpick. “Jim, this is the guy from Grantham that Chris Savas is always talking about.”

“Yeah?”

“He’s the one who does the Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade bit in Grantham. Population 1,280, right? No offence, Mr. Cooperman, but we’ve been getting whiffs of the legend from the Greek.”

“Cypriot, not Greek, sergeant. He makes a good case for the difference.”

“Whatever,” he said. “You worked these mean streets once before too, didn’t you? Something about a murder over a rare book?”

“That was a few years ago.”

“Yeah. Up in the Annex. I remember it now; you assembled all the suspects in a bookstore and pointed the guilty finger. Chuck Pepper told me about that. Right out of an Agatha Christie movie for television. You like private-eye movies, Mr. Cooperman?”

“Sure. Doesn’t everybody?”

“Savas told me you answer a question with a question. How is he? Has he made inspector yet?” For two minutes I brought them up to date about Chris Savas and his present status in the Niagara Regional Police. When I’d finished, Sykes shook his head as if I’d just asked him a question. “You know,” he said, “after all the shit going down in Grantham these days, I don’t know why a freelancer like yourself gets in his car and drives to Silver City looking for work. You know what I mean? When those tapes turned up under the false ceiling in the Medaglia case, after the place had been searched a dozen times, I mean, don’t you want to hide your head or something?”

“Are you making a soliloquy, Sergeant, or was that a question?”

“Don’t get me wrong. You weren’t on that case probably, being a rent-a-cop, but when there’s that much shit going down, a little brushes off on everybody whether they’re involved or not.”

“Like you collected in the Wentworth case?” I asked. “Kids are always getting their livers poisoned, aren’t they, when bad nurses are allowed to roam the floors of the Rose of Sharon Hospital at night.”

“There’s no crap on my boot, Cooperman,” Sykes said, straightening and getting his motion seconded by a groan from the chair. “The inquiry cleared us completely, or did your lips turn blue before you’d read that far? The papers are never so happy as when they’ve got a cop to hang out to dry, peeper.”

“Why don’t you tell me how you manage traffic lights and colour-coded index cards? Party games tire me. Why don’t we cut out the dancing around?” I got him with the colour-blindness: he blinked like a sports czar with his hand caught in the pension fund.

“What are you doing in my town, Mr. Cooperman?”

“I’ve been hired to keep somebody from getting killed.”

“Oh? So, you’re a bodyguard now! Next week it’ll be the secret service.”

I turned to Boyd and asked, “Is it the audience that gets him excited, or is he always like this?” Boyd opened his mouth as though about to utter, but closed it when Sykes stood up, letting his height, looming above me, play the cheap menace trick. I tried not to look intimidated, knowing all the time that he could chew me up in little pieces and swallow me without choking. I tried to look bored. “Why are you acting the heavy in this, Sykes? Didn’t I come to you? Didn’t I show my credentials? Didn’t I do the diplomatic thing? What do you want from my life? I’m just trying to make a living.” Sykes and Boyd exchanged looks. I waited. In his own good time Sykes moved my credentials across the desk towards me. Taking my time from him, I put them away in my wallet.

“Okay, if you’ll cut the crap, I will. I was just trying to see how you bounced. No offence. Saves time in the end. So, the Moss woman has hired you? You buy her story that she was the intended victim?”

“She hired me, didn’t she? That must say something. She’s scared that whoever killed Renata Sartori was really after her.”

“Yeah. We’re back in the movies again. But you could just as easily be a blind. You could be window dressing.”

“I didn’t come here to argue with you, Sergeant. You know a lot more than I do. This is my first day on the job. You’ve got a two-week hop on me and resources I can’t even imagine. If you think she did it, you must have good reasons. Since she’s not out on bail or in the lock-up, you can’t make a charge stick yet.”

“She had the motive, the opportunity, and we found the spent shotgun shells in her locker. Now, in my book, that puts the fancy wrapping paper around the package.”

When your eyeballs suddenly leap out of your head, there is hardly anything you can do to avoid looking like an animated cartoon of a cat being hit on the head by a large mallet. I took out my handkerchief and blew my nose loudly. I tried to work it out. I wanted to think. I thought of England, remembered the
Maine
, to help my breathing return to normal. I was smart enough not to speak. I nodded twice to give a sage indication of the assessment Jack Sykes had just made of the evidence pointing to Vanessa’s guilt. Of course, the whole scenario hit me all at once. Vanessa hadn’t told me because I might not take on her little problem. Shotgun shells found in her locker! She was damned right I would have stayed at home cultivating my non-existent garden. I was blazing mad at my own stupidity and more than a little upset by my old friend Stella Seco. I attempted a smile.

“You’ll have to convince me about the motive. She’s looking for people shooting down on her from above, not shooting up from below. I’ve seen her in action. She can handle the little guys without resorting to weapons larger than a pink slip. Opportunity? I thought she could demonstrate that she was out of town.”

“Conveniently out of town.”

“And I’m the convenient dodge to put you off. She hires me to show that she couldn’t possibly be the guilty party. Everything is looking suspicious because it’s convenient for your suspect. It’s one of those ‘if you thought that I thought that you thought that I thought’ routines. You can’t collar her with ifs.”

“You just see if I can’t.” He reached into the bottom right-hand drawer of his dull grey desk and lifted out a plastic freezer bag. Inside lay two used red shotgun shells. He threw the bag at me, and I picked it up. To me one shotgun shell looks like another, but I tried not to show it.

“You found these in her locker, right? Where do they get off having lockers in fancy offices like hers?”

“I wondered that too. She says that there are sensitive documents that need overnight protection a little stronger than your average filing cabinet or desk. I know that a locker closed with a—” Here he paused long enough to retrieve a second plastic freezer bag from the same drawer. “—combination lock isn’t Fort Knox, but you have to admit it’s safer than—”

“Where you keep your evidence, for example,” I said.

“During working hours, Cooperman. During working hours.” Again he tossed the bag towards me and again I examined it through the plastic. It was an ordinary combination lock that, by the look of its broken shackle, had been cut off by powerful bolt cutters.

“You’ve tried the combination of this lock against the combination you got from your suspect?”

Sykes looked me straight in the face and said, “Sure we did.” It was one of his little white lies. I could read that much in his partner’s face. Boyd didn’t say much, but he provided lots of information without troubling his vocal cords.

“Where did all of this take place, Sergeant?”

“You better call me Jack like everybody else or they won’t know who you’re talking about. You’re Sam, is that right?” For a minute I thought he knew about my brother who works across the street from NTC in one of the hospitals.

“‘Ben’ or ‘Benny’ will do nicely. And you get ‘Jim,’ is that right, Sergeant Boyd?” I asked, turning towards him. He nodded. The three of us took a breath and waited for the second act to begin on an even keel. Only it couldn’t start yet, because I had to hurry back to NTC to meet some of the possible villains in this case. And I wanted to speak to my damned client about omissions in her story.

FIVE

The meeting on the twentieth floor was a blur of names and faces. There was a balding six-footer sitting across from me called a comptroller, but what the two women bracketing me did, I never learned. I couldn’t begin to sort them all out. I counted the bodies, divided them into men and women and promptly forgot the result. There were about half a dozen women, maybe, and twice that many men. The men affected a studied casualness in their dress: leather jackets gently cupping generous bellies, sweaters from the Outer Hebrides and Irish tweed over Gallagher shirts. The women had adopted more conservative pant suits and tailored skirts, both real and imitation top labels. I patted my pocket for the Kit Kat bar. I’d left it someplace. I could only hope that there would be coffee and biscuits.

Printed smiles cut through the serious look around this monumental table. Such were the junior executives answerable to Vanessa. Here were some of the rivals for her job. All of them looked worried under the template of affability, anxious to impress Vanessa and each other. One of them, Jack McKellar, head of the children’s section, I think, tried to trip Vanessa up when she mentioned
Gambit
, a CTV program that she’d seen.

“Why were you tuned to CTV, Vanessa?
Gambit
is opposite our
Unprivate Eye.”
He tried to look bewildered.

“I’m moonlighting at CTV, Jack, because they don’t surround me with idiotic, back-stabbing yes-men. They pay me more into the bargain.”

McKellar wasn’t altogether clear that Vanessa had made a joke. Nor were half the others at the table. They tried to show expressions that could be read either way. Later on, Vanessa dropped in a homily explaining that part of her job involved knowing what the opposition was up to, that there was more to running her department than enforcing the No Smoking rules. McKellar was unconvinced.