Howard Engel - The Cooperman Variations (A Benny Cooperman Mystery)

PENGUIN CANADA

THE COOPERMAN VARIATIONS

HOWARD ENGEL is the creator of the enduring and beloved detective Benny Cooperman, who, through his appearance in twelve best-selling novels, has become an internationally recognized fictional sleuth. Two of Engels novels have been adapted for TV movies, and his books have been translated into several languages. He is the winner of numerous awards, including the 2005 Writers Trust of Canada Matt Cohen Award, the 1990 Harbourfront Festival Prize for Canadian Literature and an Arthur Ellis Award for crime fiction. Howard Engel lives in Toronto.

Also in the Benny Cooperman series

The Suicide Murders

Murder on Location

Murder Sees the Light

The Ransom Game

A City Called July

A Victim Must Be Found

Dead and Buried

There Was An Old Woman

Getting Away with Murder

Memory Book

East of Suez

Also by Howard Engel

Murder in Montparnasse

Mr. Doyle & Dr. Bell

HOWARD ENGEL

A BENNY COOPERMAN MYSTERY

PENGUIN CANADA

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Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),

a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2001

Published in this edition, 2008

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright Howard Engel, 2001

Flow chart on page 97 compiled by Jacob Engel

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Publishers note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in Canada.

ISBN-13: 978-0-14-316757-0

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For

Harry J. Boyle

The

Cooperman

Variations

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 wont 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. Wallys 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? Ive been up since they called me in at six to do a backgrounder on that rap singer who was arrested. I thought Id 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. Keoghs 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. Im always trying to patch my ignorance.

What did he die of, Wally?

He drowned. Up north. Swimming. Far from the worlds concert halls. Wally cast a wounded eye at the locked and barred door of the Di. Wallys shoulders were fragile and defeated. If I blew, hed melt.

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

People are still buying his records, Benny. Its crazy. Hes as dead as the Diana Sweets, but he keeps on making money. Hell, I made a few bucks off him this morning. Maybe youll 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 Dis 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 citys nervous system. The Di provided a sort of community dialysisit 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.