The Cooperman Variations (21 page)

“Peggy!”
I said, the thing hitting me at the last possible moment.
“Peggy O’Toole!
How are you?” It was my dear Peggy from the case I’d helped work on in Niagara Falls some years ago. I’d hoped to run into her, but since the great north woods don’t work the way streets in Grantham do, I’d pretty well given up any hope of running into her at the intersection of Beaver Meadow and Muskrat.

“Gosh, Benny, it’s so
good
to see you! I can’t get over it. You
remembered
me! I was just a little girl when you saw me last. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about all that time that’s gone. Remember? Niagara Falls and all the trouble we had making
Ice Bridge
with Mr. Sayre. You remember
Jim Sayre
, I hope? The director? He, Mr. Sayre, is coming up to see us this summer, Benny. Will he be surprised to see you!”

“I hope I’m still around, but it looks—”

“You’ll just
have
to be around. You’re
family
, Benny. Even if we hardly ever see you. Even my mother asks about you. And Mr. Sayre, why he thinks … You look wonderful, Benny!”

“You look wonderful yourself, Peggy.”

“Go on. In this light? I look … well, frankly, I don’t care how I look. Gosh it’s good to see you!”

“You’ve grown up fine, Peggy. I’ve even followed your career. I boasted to my mother that I knew you when.”

“What did she say?”

“She reminded me of when my father sold his original shares of IBM. I guess she thinks I let you get away.”

“You’ll never get away from me, Pistachio. You can tell her that from me. But, what are
you
doing here? You can’t be working on a case. Not
here.”

“You’d be surprised. I’m only here for another—”

“Benny. What are you doing now? Right
now?”

“I’m talking to—”

“I don’t mean that. You have to meet Hamp! You’ve never met him, and I’ve been talking to him about you for years.
My God!
Is it
ten years?”
It was more than ten, but I wasn’t going to tell her. The years had been good to her. She not only looked as lovely as she is in the movies, but she even looked happy. I was glad of that, because I remembered her as a troubled young woman when we’d first met. But that was before her marriage to Hamp Fisher and all of his eccentricities.

The upshot of the conversation in the parking lot was a short walk from where I’d parked my car, following the white wraparound hem of Peggy’s skirt to where she’d parked her Range Rover. It was like Vanessa all over again. In no time, together with my newly purchased bathing suit, I was sitting beside Peggy as she shifted her gears up and down the highway that ran from Bracebridge to her cottage somewhere beyond the point where I’d earlier turned off the road to Evans’s Marina. Only about half of her gear changes were absolutely necessary, but it was nice to see that she took her driving seriously. There was also a fair amount of Peggy’s tanned legs visible as she managed the gears and adjusted the outside mirrors on both sides of us. Further, there was a kind of paralysis in my breathing when she turned to check the road behind her for rivals to her mastery of the road. The strain on her buttons tweaked my masculinity by its nose, or something. I was feeling guilty about looking, since I’d just been made a member of the family circle, but my hormones are always speaking out of turn. They have no sense of decorum. I sometimes think that my sexuality is like having an idiot brother who follows me around. I make excuses for him, I apologize for him, but there he sits, drooling. I try to ignore him, attempt to engage the female of my acquaintance in elevated chat, but his demented leer gets in the way when she so much as breathes or leans over to improve the position of the Rover’s floor mat. He is so incorrigible at times, I’ve considered sending him away, but most of the time I think with kindness and understanding he can still be managed at home.

An hour later, I was aboard
Wanda III
, taking a short spin around Lake Muskoka. Well, not really a spin.
Wanda III
doesn’t spin. She’s a lady, and she takes things more calmly than the powerboats and motor launches we could see coming up and down a narrows on our right.

“This is Millionaires’ Row,” Hamp said, pointing at the huge summer homes of the wealthy of another age. I tried to remember what Norma McArthur had told me about Millionaires’ Row back at the lodge. Funny that Hamp should be pointing it out. His cottage was as large and as impressive as any of these hundred-year-old follies. “That’s where Sir John Craig Eaton built his summer house. He kept the lawn in front cut as though he were in the city. Over there, behind the white boathouse, lived Sir Wilfred Chambers. I hear that he had to blast away a small mountain to put in a tennis court back in the 1920s. Next to it, with the green gingerbread, is the house of Ettie Cohen. You know, the
Titanic
survivor? Ettie went into a lifeboat only when Captain Smith insisted. She wrote a book about it. This place was built for her by an admirer from Seattle. Lumber baron. Now look up on the hill beyond the point. There’s the place where General Fields, the breakfast cereal man, and the heiress of his chief rival built a secret love nest with twenty rooms. They thought nobody up here in Canada would know that they were not—what’s the phrase?—legally united.”

I remembered hearing that Hampton Fisher was a bit of a prude years ago. He was a lot of other things too, including being the closest thing to a genius to enter the boardrooms of newspapers he controlled. He had always been a paradox: a guy who hated germs and shunned society, but who went swimming under the polar ice cap and climbing in the Himalayas. I remembered that Vanessa had told me he set up the NTC network himself and still owned a controlling share of the voting stock. Years ago in the Falls, I never got a good look at him because he never went out. Once, I was watching Peggy shoot a scene in front of the American Falls. When I turned around and looked up, there was Hamp Fisher watching the same thing from his penthouse balcony. It struck me then as a little eerie, but I could never figure out why.

Fisher had aged well. His hair was too long for a boardroom. Still, the grey temples reminded me of the old “Men of Distinction” ads I’d seen in ancient magazines in people’s summer cottages. His yachting outfit was immaculate too, like another page in the same old magazines, but he brought the effect off with panache. He didn’t look as though he had his drinking water flown in from California any longer. Maybe he never had. At the moment, he and Peggy were sitting together in white wicker chairs, like the one I was sitting in, at the rail of
Wanda III
. We were shaded from the afternoon sun by a canvas cover of stretched blue duck, through which
Wanda’
s smoke stack protruded into the air. We were in the open air, too, of course, sipping drinks from a table set up aft of the funnel. Hamp was drinking Perrier, Peggy, coffee from a tall silver Thermos, and I, ginger ale in a crystal tumbler with the name of the ship embossed in the glass. There were others aboard, too, although I had only seen one of them when I came up the gangplank.

After hearing about the rich and famous of Millionaires’ Row, I heard about how they loved Muskoka, how they were thinking of building a cottage when the lease on the one they had expired. Hamp made an attempt or two at asking me about me, but I couldn’t get up enough steam. Peggy kept interrupting me and buttering up my past. She kept quizzing me about the case I was working on. After a while, I sketched it in for them in broad outline. Of course both had heard about the murder, and Hamp knew the people at NTC. Peggy recognized the parallels with the movie
Laura
, and moving to it was as good a way as any to get away from the more obscure facts of my investigation. Peggy launched into an appreciation of the face structure of Gene Tierney. “It’s her jaw, really. Any good orthodontist could have spoiled all that.”

When I got the chance, I wondered out loud about their presence on the lake. “Isn’t there a need for both of you to be elsewhere? Aren’t the boardrooms and the sound stages crying out ‘Where are they?’”

“Let ’em holler,” said Peggy, and Hamp grinned his endorsement. “We both worked flat out this winter, Benny. I did two movies, back to back, no rest in between. And Hamp has been trying to step back and let his organization run things. What’s the use of setting up a big structure if you don’t stand back and see whether it works or not? Oh, I’ve brought up a few scripts with me, but, to be honest, I haven’t read one of them. Hamp sometimes reaches for one of his boxes, but he knows better than to do it when I’m around.”

“You see the tyranny I live under, Mr. Cooperman. Not a minute to call my own.”

“But you have had time to do some scuba diving, I understand.”

“Not this year. Last year’s experience rather spoiled it for me. Oh, I’ve made a few small dives, just enough to keep the McCordick brothers happy. I get my diving gear from them over in Bala. But last spring, at the end of April, I dived a wreck here on the lake.”

“The only wreck I know about is the S.S.
Waome
, which sank coming out of Port Carling in the mid-1930s.”

“That’s the one! She sank in a freak squall in the fall of 1934. It was like a water spout. Came out of nowhere.
Waome
heeled over to port, water rushed in through the mooring chocks. She lies in eighty feet of water. I’ve seen her. By the end of the summer, I expect there will be few serious divers who
haven’t
seen her.”

“Why all the interest?” I wondered out loud.

“I expect it has to do with Dermot Keogh’s death. There are morbid sensation hunters even among skilled scuba divers, Ben.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“She looked a lot like the
Segwin
that still plies the lake. But
Waome
was built with big glass windows and large freight doors close to the waterline. When the squall heeled her over, the water rushed in faster than I can tell it. Three were lost, the captain suffered a heart attack, the rest of the crew swam to a nearby island. In the summer, the steamship would have had twenty, maybe fifty passengers, but this was early October, so there was only one. One of the ship’s officers, a man named Thompson, tried to rescue him from the saloon, but the door was closed on them by the water and both were trapped. The company called on divers from Prescott, on the St. Lawrence, to get the bodies. When I saw her, she was still in one piece, lying right side up. Hadn’t let the cold, dark waters break her up.”

“Was Dermot Keogh on that dive?”

“It was his idea. We planned the dive summer before last when Peggy and I were staying with him, while we were looking for a place last summer.”

“It was horrible,” said Peggy. “I get goosebumps just thinking about it. We had to go to a hotel in Bracebridge, just to get away from the media. Some holiday.”

“Were you in the water with him when it happened?” I watched Hamp Fisher look straight at me, as though he was trying to figure out how much of this I wanted to hear. Then he looked away in the direction of the funnel and sipped his Perrier.

“Dermot was a good diver for an amateur,” he said. “He had been checked out on all of the equipment we took with us. The McCordick brothers know their equipment and are careful who they rent it to. I hadn’t leased
Wanda III
yet, so we were using a Sea Ray 200 with two inflatable rafts. There were six of us: two to stay topside and four divers. Dermot and I were teamed up, and Jeff Hetherington and Penny Freeman were buddies.”

“She’s about five seven,” contributed Peggy, “with short brown hair. She still has traces of an English accent after thirty years in Canada.” I nodded to show that I was appreciative of the details.

“Hetherington is a young fellow we met that summer,” Hamp said. “He’s a student, or was one, in Niagara Falls. We met him at the marina when I was renting the Sea Ray. He had learned scuba diving on a holiday in Belize, but hadn’t tried Lake Muskoka yet.”

“I met Penny just about where I met you this afternoon, Benny. My shopping bag split and I had apples and lemons rolling all over the asphalt. She repacked her things and gave me one of her plastic bags and helped me load up the car. I brought her back for drinks. She learned her scuba diving in Alberta of all places.” Peggy was smiling at the memory.

“So, the four of you were pretty experienced?”

“I don’t know whether Penny or Jeff had ever worked at that depth or had to carry their own lights before. The waters near the reefs off Belize are very clear, Ben. You can see for miles. But here. Ha! It’s black as deep outer space down there.”

“How did you know where to dive?”

“The wreck’s had a buoy marking the spot for years now. Once we’d tied the boat and the rafts together, we lowered a long anchor line as well. We used the rope attached to the marker as our guide rope. Again, I can’t emphasize the blackness of this water once you get down a few feet.”

“And Dermot Keogh was okay all this while? No problems?”

Hamp Fisher laced his long fingers together around a knee as he picked his words. “We’d been down nearly twenty minutes before he started having trouble. We’d found
Waome
on her bottom, still in one piece, as I said. We did a survey from stem to stern. We located one of the open freight doors, and taking turns in pairs, we went inside. Jeff and Penny went first. When it was our turn, I followed Dermot into the ship. We went down through the freight door and through the lower saloon to the companionway leading to the main saloon. It was hard getting through the stairs, so again, I followed Dermot. When I got there, that is, in the upper saloon, I found Dermot had spit out his mouthpiece.”

“You mean there was trapped air inside?”

“No, Ben, we were both under water and at about eighty feet. You understand, for an experienced diver, the sight of your buddy with his mouthpiece out isn’t as immediately frightening as it might seem. We learn to make adjustments and to hold our breath while doing them. The air supply is always ready and waiting. But that wasn’t what Dermot was trying to do. He was trying to unhook his tank, his weights, everything. I went over to him, caught up his mouthpiece and tried to help. That’s when he lunged at me. I say lunged, it was more like fending me off, a warning to keep my distance. I swam around behind him. Again, I found his breathing tube and held it in place. This time, he couldn’t reach me with his hands, but he was wilder now, more frantic. Somehow, he pushed me away again and the diving mask came free. And he’d unhooked the main belt. Thinking there might be something wrong with his air supply, I took off my own and tried to fit it over his mouth. He beat me off again. That’s the part I never could understand. His brain must have been confused. That’s when I started to panic myself. You see, we were swimming free. Apart from the buoy line and the anchor rope, there was no contact with the diving raft. Dermot was smaller than I, but I wasn’t able to fix the mouthpiece in place again, and he was breathing out what air he still held. I couldn’t think of what to do. The other pair were at least a minute and a half away from me, if they were still hanging around the freight door. I tried again to approach him. I shouldn’t have come at him from the front. He got an arm around my neck even before I could find his air supply. Once he got me around the neck, I dropped the light I was carrying and it left us in relative darkness. Using my feet, I was able to free myself. I rescued the lamp and kept on swimming until I reached the outside of the hull. I indicated that Dermot was in trouble, gave the danger signal, and we swam back inside. By that time, Dermot had passed out. He was floating under the ceiling of the saloon. He’d jettisoned his tank and weights. At least we didn’t have to fight him any more. We got his air going again and strapped the tank back on his back. As quickly as we could, we evacuated him, got him out of
Waome
and back up to the raft. It could have been as much as three minutes in all. As soon as we got him on the raft, Jeff started the usual resuscitation routine. We took turns. Meanwhile, the boat crew called through to Bracebridge for an ambulance. We kept up the artificial respiration until the paramedic team relieved us. By then, we were back in harbour at Port Carling.” After saying this, Hamp was still. His eyes scanned the far side of the lake.