Over coffee at the Second Cup across the street, where I’d had my first long talk with Jack and his partner, I pondered the changes in my position. The cops held all of the hard evidence in both the cases I was interested in. I’d even been some use to them: helping them to justify linking the two deaths and being on guard about the appearance of suicide in the Foley business. I wondered whether Sergeant Chuck Pepper was included in the ban. The Chief might not know about the Cooperman-Pepper axis yet. That might still be a live connection, but not one I cared to try out until the dust settled. Even as I went over the ground, I still half-expected Sykes or Boyd to walk into the café and pick up the tab like last time. But they didn’t.
Back at Vanessa’s NTC office, I weathered Sally Jackson’s painful apologies for the way our quiet drink ended. She was very kind about my eye, which had turned an impressive purple with a rim of pale yellow reaching through green for blue. She reported that Gordon had gone off meekly into the night almost as soon as Sally had explained who I was. This kind of behaviour, she reported, was new to Gordon, and probably wouldn’t happen again. “He tried to sleep in his car last night, parked across from Crystal’s apartment, but he was made to move on by the cops. Now he thinks I called them. I know, because he was on the phone in the middle of the night. I’m at my wit’s end with that man, Benny.” Sally was looking a little wilted this morning. She’d taken extra care dressing and making up her face. The results showed more about her rough night than her voice did. I wondered whether Ken Trebitsch gave her a little extra on the side for being his snoop in Vanessa’s kingdom. I was guessing that it was Trebitsch who called the Chief.
“Where’s her ladyship?”
“Closeted with Mr. Thornhill. He called early; she had to reschedule two meetings.”
“What does Mr. Thornhill want?”
“Hard to say. He’s been on her back all week. He wants changes in the department. I know that. She’s not giving him an inch. She’s fighting him on the changes. So far, there are no winners.”
“Is Mr. Thornhill in this alone, or does he have allies?”
“Oh, Ken Trebitsch has his hands in that pie too. A bigger bite of prime time might make him smile. He might even take me to lunch without pumping me for information. Ken’s an empire builder of the old school. Thornhill likes him, because he knows the type. He’s easier to understand than someone like Ms. Moss.” This sounded like a confession. My black eye was paying off in spades.
“Do you trust Trebitsch?”
“As far as I can throw a baby grand. He’s had people in here measuring the floor space. How’s that for undermining the opposition?”
Before I could answer, Vanessa was suddenly standing there in the doorway. “Undermining what opposition?” she demanded. Her eyes looked as though she wanted to hit somebody. Anybody.
“I was asking about Ken Trebitsch.”
“That son of a bitch! He’s got more clocks on the wall of his office than CBS, NBC, ABC and Switzerland put together. He’s the sort of newsman who’s just bursting to yell, ‘Sweetheart, get me rewrite!’ The only trouble is that he wouldn’t get the joke. You have to recognize a cliché before you can see the fun.”
“You’ve had a rough morning,” I said, trying to change the subject.
“All my mornings are rough, Benny. You should see some of them. They dump their slag on my afternoons, which are worse.” I thought that after last night she might have lowered her gunsights. I never figured out why I was the favourite target for her black humour. Almost everything she said suggested that she was the only one who did any work at NTC. I don’t know what she was complaining about. She was still alive, wasn’t she?
Vanessa was wearing a charcoal grey pant suit with a white shirt that aped an Oxford button-down. She wore it open at the neck without a tie, just the way I like it. Her hair had abandoned the loose, newly combed look of the previous evening, and was now severely bound by an unforgiving silver clasp. “You’re expected to attend me this afternoon, Benny. My afternoons are dillies. Friday afternoons are the worst of the bunch. Especially now that this damned Dermot Keogh Hall is in the works.”
“How does that make it worse?”
“Where to start?” She took a breath. “Raymond Devlin is looking after Dermot Keogh’s estate. You know that. Since he decided to give a big whack of that money to us, he has been demanding first-class treatment from Ted Thornhill. Well, big, brave Ted has passed him on to me as often as he could. Ray needs a lot of hand-holding, Benny, and I’ve been elected to do most of it. After all, he can still back out if he wants to.”
“What about those papers I witnessed in your office?”
“That’s just for the building. He’s got I.M. Pei to do the design. Did I tell you? He’s the best. The big money will come later to sustain programs and endow concert series. Ray wants to keep a continuing interest in the Hall, even after it’s been launched. We’re going to see a lot of Ray Devlin around here in the next few years.”
She rested a small briefcase on the edge of Sally’s desk and opened it. She sorted some papers and left three with Sally. Then she added, as though it had just occurred to her: “Benny, I’m off to L.A. tonight. I’ll be there for four days, maybe longer. I’ll be back Tuesday at the earliest. I have to see the new man at Universal to get something solid in the way of deadlines and delivery dates. I’ve got to take a meeting with Max Winkler at Warners to settle the fall schedule. You got all that?” She was relaxing a little behind her rapid-fire stream of talk.
“I’ll pack a bag,” I said.
“What for? Nobody on the coast is trying to kill me.”
“But, where better to nail you?”
“Your job is here.”
“But, Vanessa!”
“I’ve thought it through, Benny. I can look after myself in L.A.” There wasn’t any point in arguing further.
“I’ll unpack,” I said. “Do you want me to drive you to the airport?”
“George is driving me, Benny. Now he drives as well as parks. He’s moving up in the world.”
Later, just when I was getting tired of moving from floor to floor, maintaining radio silence in the elevators and being dragged limp from meeting to meeting with Vanessa, I discovered that Vanessa kept up communications between appointments on her cellphone, which she used as she walked down the corridors. Once she emerged from the Ladies’ with the phone to her ear.
“Mark, are you listening to me, Mark? I want no more monkey business from you. I want the first six episodes, as you promised, on the agreed date. No ifs, ands or buts. So fix it up and get the six shows to me on time.”
Then she was in a wrangle with another outside producer. “Yesterday’s Headlines, Frank, is a game show. Why show it to Ken Trebitsch, sweety? Game shows are Entertainment, not News. Yesterday’s news is history, Frank, and that’s Entertainment. Capisce?” She lowered the cellphone and dumped it in her bag.
When I found a clear moment, I asked her more about her place on Lake Muskoka. While we waited in a very empty boardroom, between meetings, she filled me in on the details of how to get there and where to find the keys, which were kept hidden in an old barbecue under a leanto with other half-discarded junk such as paddles, broken oars, folding chairs and old sun umbrellas. She didn’t question me about what I was planning. To tell the truth, I don’t think she cared much. She had already moved out of Toronto and its problems; she was already in Los Angeles defending NTC interests against the moguls at Universal and Warners. When I bugged her to give me numbers where she could be located, she said she’d leave them in an envelope with Sally. We got through the whole afternoon without once looking into one another’s eyes. Last night was already in a sealed box, dropped overboard, only leaving me with the knowledge that she slept with a loaded gun under her pillow.