Murder on Location, page 1
PENGUIN CANADA
MURDER ON LOCATION
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 Engel’s 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 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
The Cooperman Variations
Memory Book
East of Suez
Also by Howard Engel
Murder in Montparnasse
Mr. Doyle & Dr. Bell
HOWARD ENGEL
A BENNY COOPERMAN MYSTERY
PENGUIN CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1986
First published in Canada by Clarke Irwin & Company Ltd., 1982
First published in the United States of America by St. Martin’s Press, 1985
Published in this edition, 2008
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Copyright © Howard Engel, 1982
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s 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: 978-0-14-316755-6
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For William and Charlotte
and in memory of
Ted Adams and Prynce Nesbitt
ONE
I was sitting in the lobby of the Tudor Hotel in Niagara Falls on the Canadian side of the river, looking at the back section of the Star-Enterprise and glancing up from time to time to catch who was coming in and going out the revolving front door. Perched behind a potted palm I felt like a hotel dick as I read for the sixth time about local births and deaths. When I ran out of cigarettes, I bought a pack in the smoke shop just a couple of doors away, and was back at my post before my quarry could have come and gone more than a dozen times. Private investigation is an imperfect craft and my methods are hit and miss. It’s doggedness that pays off in the end.
The lobby was more crowded than usual that evening: couples checking in, noisy groups going up to the top-floor bar or to the convention rooms. A uniformed policeman stood chatting with the bell captain. Some of the movie people had started to arrive, so there was more than the usual amount of bustle on the part of the staff. Those who weren’t staying at Butler’s Barracks—the local, unofficial name for the posh Colonel John Butler Hotel—were booked here at the Tudor. The Colonel John was bigger, running for most of a block across the river, but the Tudor was more exclusive. I wondered how David Hayes had managed to afford the Tudor. Maybe he’d landed that big movie job he’d set out to get a week ago.
I was chewing on that when the light of the lobby chandelier was cut off by a body getting in the way. For a minute I thought it would go away, so I didn’t look up. When it wouldn’t move on, I guessed it was looking at me.
“Well, if it isn’t Benny Cooperman, my favourite private eye. How’s it going, Benny? You making a buck?” It was Wally Skeat from the Falls TV station. He used to be a disc jockey in Grantham before he got fired, and now he was a working journalist, a card-carrying member of the press. I’d seen him reading the evening news.
“Hi, Wally. You hustling too?” He tried on a tortured smile to show how I misjudged him, pulled over a high-backed chair with dark corkscrew legs and settled down opposite me. I could still see the door over his shoulder.
“This is the big time, Benny. Are you trying to land a part in the movie?”
“You know better than that. I do all my play-acting looking for strayed or stolen spouses.”
“Come on. I remember you were in Ned Evans’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Montecello Park last summer.
“Yeah, my Starveling really stole the show.”
“Never mind,” he said letting his bass notes tumble down to the rug and roll around heavily. “Experience is experience. Don’t knock it. And from what I hear, Ice Bridge is going to be a great flick. Remember where you heard it first. It’s got everything going for it: there are stars like Dawson Williams and Peggy O’Toole, the director’s James A. Sayre, and the local boy himself, Neil Furlong, working on the script. Now is that a winner or is that a winner?” For a second, I thought I heard some treble notes sneaking into his voice, but I don’t think Wally’d heard about treble. “And,” he continued, “it’ll all be photographed against the background of one of the seven natural wonders of the world. It can’t miss. Nothing since Marilyn Monroe made Niagara in the 1950s can touch it. I hear it’s got a budget big enough for two pictures. That’s a lot of chips and gravy, Benny.” Wally stopped to breathe at last.
“How long will they be here?”
“Three weeks on the nose. Every minute planned. The stars have started arriving. Miranda Pride is here. She was a star when they were still cutting them out of pure gold. And Dawson Williams. Damn it all, it’s exciting. And all happening right here.” He sat with a smile on his shining moon-face, probably thinking of Williams as Robin Hood back in the fifties. I was. Then he leaned over, shortening the gap between us. “Look, Benny, are you looking for a part? There are extras to be picked locally, and a few bits with lines. Say the word and I’ll talk to Ed Noonan, the local casting director. I’m serious, Benny. You know, for you, it’s up to here.” He made a chop at his left arm with the edge of his right hand.
“You ever hear of a Grantham girl named Billie Mason? She might be trying to get a part.”
“Her and a thousand others. Why, even Ned and his gang from Grantham are here staying at the Clifford Arms, that old firetrap. Noonan’s a hard guy to see, Benny, but just say the word, just say the word.” In another minute, after reciting the names of other actors who were coming out from Hollywood to be in Ice Bridge, he took his leave to go back to work. Wally worked in the Pagoda, the newest of the tourist towers overlooking the falls. The TV station rented studio space near the top, and a revolving restaurant turned once an hour just above Wally’s newscast.
I should explain my interest in being at the Falls was only indirectly connected with the movie. Wally was right. I’d been a pretty good Starveling in The Dream, but it was bread and butter that brought me from my Grantham office to Niagara Falls this frosty first Monday of the year. It was then about eleven at night. Nine hours earlier, I’d been sitting in my office on St. Andrew Street wondering where I was going to get half a big one to renew my licence, when in walks a living, breathing client, with slip-on rubbers and an astrakhan collar on his coat. He was a man of forty with a solid, tanned face topped with short, greying hair that looked like you could scour pots and pans with it. Solid was the word for the rest of him too, except for his belly, which pushed the front of his coat through the door ahead of him. He held in his hand one of those furry fedoras that look like the offspring of priv ate doings on a crowded hat shelf in the dark. His yellow eyes were worried and gave the lie to the smile pencilled in with no great conviction.
We fooled around sparring for a few minutes, then I began to find out why he’d dropped in. His name was Lowell Mason, he ran a real-estate organization on King Street, and his wife, Billie, had gone missing just after Christmas with no warning. After giving me the life story of both of them, and a quarterly report on his business, he showed me an eight-by-ten picture of a good-looking woman in her mid-thirties with ash-blonde hair.
“What are you most afraid of?” I finally asked him.
“To tell you the truth,” he said to the coat rack, “I think she’s been murdered.”
“Murdered” was not a word I heard across my desk every day, and it took a minute to develop and print it. “That’s serious stuff, Mr. Mason. Who would want to kill your wife?”
He shook his head helplessly. All I could come back with was the usual drill about how few people get murdered. I was sure that she would be found in one piece. Then I told him that it sounded like a missing-person job and that the police were still front-runners in that market.
“I’ve got connections with the police.”
“So?”
“So, it was a friend of mine there that gave me your name.”
“Come on, Mr. Mason. Look, cops can get thick in the head too. I’m not the Mounties. If you ask my friends at the cop shop they’ll tell you that they do all my work for me. They’re not kidding. I …”
“I’m asking you to take the case, Mr. Cooperman.”
“Why?”
“Because I want her found.”
“And?”
“I don’t want her to get hurt.”
“And?”
“And I miss her, and I can’t stand the place without smelling her burning something in the kitchen.”
When he left, I had the eight-by-ten glossy of his wife and a fair-sized retainer. He told me the make of her car and gave me a lecture about the unpaid parking tickets she collected on the dashboard before telling me the licence number. The big piece of information he left with me was that Billie was stage-struck. She had played Stella in A Streetcar Name Desire for the Grantham Little Theatre last October.
I put in a call to Robin O’Neil at CXAN. Robin had been an announcer long before Wally Skeat breezed in and out. On the side, he still ran the Little Theatre with a lot of arty flair that got on Ned Evans’ nerves. From Robin I learned that Billie Mason had talent, that she was a malleable actress, but that she had made a cheap success of the part of Stella. He told me that the CBC had interviewed her about her acting two months ago, although he had to admit there were other actresses in town just as talented. When I asked whether she was particularly friendly with any other members of the cast, I heard the name David Hayes for the first time.
“What about David Hayes?”
“David was a great Mitch. He was Mitch. He was very good. And he’s not even a serious actor. More interested in writing. Works at the Beacon. He was one of Monty Blair’s protégés.” I learned that Hayes had driven Billie home from rehearsals a few times in his beat-up classic Jaguar with a cracked windshield. When I called the Beacon, Grantham’s long-lived daily, I found out from an editor that Hayes hadn’t been seen at his desk in a week.
From there I floundered around talking to Hugo Shackleford, who serviced the Jaguar, and to Hayes’ landlady, who let me see his room only when I told her I was trying to deliver a summons. Hayes had cleared out about the same time Billie’d disappeared. I took a flyer and guessed that they had both headed to the Falls to get bits in the movie. It was a pretty limp theory, but it stiffened up when I discovered a cracked windshield on a broken-down Jaguar Mk VII in the parking lot at the Tudor Hotel. From the hotel desk I learned that David Hayes, newspaperman from Grantham, was registered by himself in Room 1738. He wasn’t in when I rang the number. I had no better luck in the bar, the restaurant or the snack bar. So that’s when I settled down among the sheltering potted palms and waited … and waited.
TWO
I didn’t get back to my over-heated room at the City House in Grantham until about two in the morning. As I pulled my damp shoes off, I felt that I’d already given Lowell Mason value for money. The snow-plough coming along King Street moved a blue flashing shadow up a wall and across the ceiling of my room, and I fell asleep to the alarm clock threatening me at each tick with an early wake-up call.
By the time I was fit to talk on Tuesday morning, I was beginning to sort things out. First I wanted to see about Mason’s business, and when it comes to real estate I always go to Martha Tracy for information. She works for Scarp Enterprises, the biggest real-estate and property development outfit in the Niagara district. As secretary to the managing director there isn’t much she doesn’t know and for the price of a beery lunch she’d always given me excellent advice. I asked her about Lowell Mason. Off the top of her head she was able to say that he was one of the five biggest operators in the area and the fastest growing. “He’s a real old-fashioned hustler, Benny. You know: rye and ginger ale in the back office. They say that he leans heavily on his wife’s looks in hooking his clients. She helps him land the fish and she enjoys the fuss men make over her. She’s over twenty-one, and her husband encourages her. She’s the out-going type. Now, I happen to be the in-going type, but what good does it do me?”
Just before I hung up, she asked what all this was in aid of, and I told her.
“Well, one thing’s sure,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“A let’s-pretend blonde like that is going to have to get professional help. She’ll need to find a good hairdresser, Benny. It’s all in the packaging.” Martha had a brilliant future as a detective that she wasn’t going hear about from me. She then invited me over to have a cup of her instant hot tap-water coffee. I think she meant it as a sign of growing intimacy, and so far I’d managed to slow the growth right there.
I spent an hour running up my long-distance bill, and when I’d finished I had the name Norman Baker, former CBC television producer, who had dispatched a crew to interview Billie Mason and was currently in hot water with the network brass about a film he was doing, or refusing to do, depending on whose version you went by. I couldn’t locate Baker himself, but the very sound of his name made a lot of secretaries giggle and several producers growl. I tore off the page with Baker’s number on it and put it in my pocket.
It was nearly noon, so I left the dusty mess of my office to grab a bite of lunch at the United Cigar Store on St. Andrew Street. They make the best chopped-egg sandwiches in town. The waitress made no wisecracks about my cowardly eating habits, she just ordered my usual for me. The mad scribbler was sitting a couple of stools away, with his shaggy head bent over his furious writing, and Mrs. Prewitt from the drug store was mining a guilty fudge sundae with a long slender spoon.
Half an hour later, I took a drive out to the north end of town to look in on my parents. When parents are getting on in years, it’s easy to forget them. I parked in front of the condominium and let myself in with my key. They never hear the two-toned chime.
“Who’s that? Benny, is that you?”
“Hello, Ma, how are you?”
“How am I? How should I be? My doctor’s in the hospital and his locum-shlocum isn’t minding the store.”
“You’re not feeling well?” She was standing in a wine-coloured zip-up housecoat with pink feathery slippers. Her hair was still tangled from sleep and her face was still upstairs in the bathroom.
“I’m fine, Benny. I just want people to stay in one place. It makes me nervous when my doctor’s in intensive care. I hope you’ve eaten lunch.”
“I just had a bite uptown.”
“I suppose I could make you an omelette. You want me to make you an omelette, Benny?”
“I just ate, Ma. Thanks anyway.”
“I know how you eat,” she said rolling her eyes. “I know what you put on your stomach.”
“Where’s Pa?” I asked.
“Gone to the club. Lately he’s been going early. I think he’s got a gin game, but I don’t ask. If his life is a card game, I’m not going to criticize. You’ve been busy?”
