Read Online The Cooperman Variations by Howard Engel - Free Book Online Page A

notebook.” I grabbed a pad from my new desk. “I live on Balmoral Avenue. That’s two south of St. Clair, off Avenue Road. The place is owned jointly by me and my husband. I’ve been there for five years. Everybody at CBC, CTV and all the other places I’ve worked knows the place. I like to give big parties. Everybody in this building knows the house, the garden and maybe even how to get into the backyard from the cemetery at the rear. All of those people you met in the boardroom were at a party two months ago. I gave it to encourage our efforts before the sweeps. Talk about business losses.”
    “What are the sweeps?”
    “Benny! Your innocence is astonishing. It’s like not knowing what’s at the end of the Yellow Brick Road,” she said, smiling indulgently. Then she cleared her throat and began again. “The sweeps are the audience surveys run at fixed times of the year. Independent head-counters measure our audiences for a test week. Our advertising rates for the next season are based on the numbers they come up with. Part of our job is to make sure that our best efforts go into those important time-slots.” I scribbled all of this on the pad I balanced on my knee, and hoped to be able to translate my shorthand afterwards. She kept right on going.
    “I found the place at the lake through Ed Patel, a small-town lawyer and an old friend of my Poppa’s. They used to hunt and fish together. The cottage is in my name; I have eight years to go before I renew the mortgage. It’s not a big place, just seven acres with only seventy-five feet of lake frontage. The lake is Muskoka. The nearest big town is Bracebridge, but Port Carling is where you go to buy charcoal and milk. Are you getting all this, Benny?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but kept larding on the facts and details. “The place is called Puckwana , and, no, I don’t know what it means. Probably Ojibway. The house replaced a log house dating from the turn of the century. The frame house is only fifty years old. I go up there to be by myself, although that’s getting harder and harder to do since Hollywood people like Peggy O’Toole and Goldie Hawn discovered Muskoka. Apart from the cellphone I leave in my car, there is no e-mail, Internet or fax up there. There is a phone, but it’s in the name of the former owner. It never rings. The lawyer I mentioned, Ed Patel, my nearest neighbour, lives an eighth of a mile away, but he’s in the Bracebridge hospital, so he didn’t see me while I was there. Nor did his secretary, Alma, because she electrocuted herself in the bath. Am I going too fast?
    “I was in the bookstore in Port Carling, but I don’t know if I created enough of a stir to make your life easy for you. You might try the Esso station on the town-side of the lift lock. I filled my tank there and got the attendant to wash my windshield. I didn’t stop to eat on my drive back to the city; I just nibbled on the things that would perish if I left them in the cottage fridge and planned on a good dinner when I got home, a dinner I never got to order, because I walked into the arms of Sergeant Jack Sykes and his merry men in blue sitting in my livingroom. How am I doing? What have I left out?”
    “When exactly was that, Vanessa?”
    “I arrived home about noon on Monday, the twentysecond of May. The long weekend, remember? I wanted to avoid the mob scene on the highways later on, and I did.”
    “So, Renata was killed on Monday, the fifteenth.”
    “What a brain! You want more about Renata? I met her when we were both nobodies, just starting out. We lived on next to nothing at 410 Jarvis Street; it was a flophouse run by an old radio actor who’d lost both his arms. That was close to the CBC in those days. Hamp Fisher was still setting up NTC. He was switching from newspapers to TV.” She stopped talking when she saw that the name had changed my expression. “Ah, you’ve heard about him? Hamp Fisher’s the chairman and controlling