“Who have you been talking to?”
“Never mind, but hear this: Winkler of Warner Brothers is watching you and you keep spoiling the picture. Were you on Lake Muskoka when Dermot Keogh drowned?”
“No. I have a place up there, but Phil Rankin warned me that Dermot had suddenly taken a dislike to all NTC types, Renata Sartori excepted, of course. So, I stayed clear of him. So did Phil, Ray and others. It was too early in the season: April.”
“Why was Raymond Devlin lumped in with you NTC types?”
“He was chief NTC counsel in the CRTC hearings that year.”
“What’s that?”
“Canadian Radio-Television Commission. They supervise and grant licences to broadcasters. They could theoretically pull the plug on all or any of us. But they don’t, no matter how badly we misbehave. That’s the way socalled ‘arm’s length’ politically appointed bodies operate in this country.”
“So Dermot spent that last summer well away from all you broadcasters?”
“The lake held other attractions. Hamp Fisher and his wife, the movie star Peggy O’Toole, had started coming up there. And there were other points of interest.” He smiled at the memory, whatever it was. I tried to imagine his sort of “interest.” Then I examined my watch.
“I’ve got to go. I hope I’ve told you what you wanted to hear.”
“Hey! You haven’t told me about Winkler at Warners!”
“More news, less personality. That’s the ticket.” I could almost see his lips repeating my invented comment. I could see that I might have a future in this business.
“Goodbye, Cooperman. Remember, what I told you was said in confidence.”
“Look, Trebitsch, if I didn’t respect confidences, I wouldn’t stay in business a week. It’s a habit. But I have to find things out in order to find things out. So long.” I got up, and left it to Ken Trebitsch to pay for my beer.
There was a taxi hovering near Ye Olde Brunswick House across the street. I grabbed it, and the driver whisked me down to King and Spadina. It was a neighbourhood of ancient sock factories and seed warehouses. The old garment district was just north of King. Here, traffic caught its breath for the ramps of the Gardiner Expressway at the last-chance gas station. In the middle of all this, I found a lush, green patch: old trees with wooden seats running around the trunks and park benches. On the north side stood a solid wall of townhouses going back to the 1870s, the remnant of a square that once boxed in the park. Number eighteen was the easternmost of the houses. It looked as though it had once had a bigger building to lean against, but that had been bulldozed away, leaving the exposed, windowless flank to the elements.
The house had a Georgian feel to it: fanlight over the door, fluted brass doorknob. The entrance looked like one on a poster I once saw of front doors of Dublin. I banged on the black woodwork. When nothing happened, I tried the huge knob. It turned. I stepped into a hall that was big enough to accommodate the walking sticks of all the elected members of the 1890 House of Commons. White stairs led up to a second floor that looked dark and uninviting. The hall leading into the back of the ground floor looked more promising.
It was a huge room, originally the kitchen of the house. An old-fashioned sink and drip board in heavy porcelain dominated the side of the room with a window. But stuffed chairs, overstuffed couches, recording machines, loudspeakers the size of boxcars, racks and racks of recording tape, and cans of film formed the focus of the studio. A double door, such as you find in a radio studio, cut off the room from the rest of the house. A wall of sound-absorbing tiles had been built against the back wall, killing noises from King Street, which backed on the property. The studio was also littered with paper: paper on desks, paper on chairs and couches. A stack of magazines overflowed against a table leg upon which half a dozen film scripts, no two lying parallel, had been scattered. They say that there is such a thing as the genius of a particular room: the room where Bach composed or where Robert Louis Stevenson wrote carries something of the essence of its owner through time. Although Dermot Keogh had been gone a year, his personality and quirks were etched on everything in the room, from the battered upright piano, a bench so broken and dangerous that it might have belonged to Glenn Gould, to the open cello case carelessly left open on a couch. The cello itself rested against a heavy music stand, the base of which was buried in music manuscripts.
“Mr. Rankin?” I called out over deadly silence. My voice sounded as crisp as a rifle shot. But there was no answer. I looked at my watch. I was on time. “Mr. Rankin!” I shouted again. Again, no answer.
Quickly I made the rounds of the rest of the place. It was plain to see that the house was not now lived in, nor had it been inhabited for a good long time. In one room, long regimental photographs on ancient wallpaper showed that the room had not been used since shortly after the First World War. The front room, which looked out on the park, had been more recently used. The walls had been painted over embossed wallpaper. Bookshelves had been rigged on the right and left of a marble fireplace. A lone peacock feather sat in a corner with a portrait of the solemn, bearded founder of the Salvation Army. (He was identified in small print at the bottom.)
The third floor was full of rooms, all of them empty, except for a pile of warped cardboard backings that photographs had once been pasted to. Now the photographs were curled into shapes like giant pasta shells. I tried to straighten one of them out, and it broke with my effort. It was a picture of a curly-headed bus driver leaning from the window of his rustic bus, holding a rose in his smiling teeth.
I returned to the studio and made a better search. To one side of the piano, under an old drafting table, I found Philip Rankin. His stillness suited the quiet of the studio. When I turned him over, I could see a bloodstain on the front of his shirt. I thought it was odd that the smell of a gunshot wasn’t still hanging about in this airless room. But there was no hint of powder in the air. I poured myself a glass of cloudy water. The pipes groaned at the intrusion.
Rankin had been alive half an hour ago, according to his face. His fingers were still flexible and lividity had only just started, as I could see through his shirt. The little blood that surrounded the wound was hardly sticky yet. Stepping back, and holding on to the piano for support, I could see where he’d been dragged. He must have been standing or sitting in one of the few chairs that weren’t burdened with papers. I lifted the cushion. There was blood on the other side, and more under it on the chair.
No murder weapon was in sight. If it hadn’t been a gun, and the lack of the right smell convinced me that it hadn’t, then Rankin had been stabbed. But then I remembered what I’d heard about Dermot Keogh: he hated sharp objects. A quick look in the drawers under the shelves near the sink showed nothing sharper than a pencil or a cake of rosin.
“Well, well, what have we here?” It was Jack Sykes, with Jim a step or two behind him. “Your pal Rankin stand you up?”
“Not exactly,” I said. I hadn’t heard them come in. Neither had the murder victim heard the murderer, I thought. A possibility.
“What’s the matter, Benny? You look like you need to sit down.”
“Yeah, you’re as white as the walls,” added Jim. “Sit down.”
“Can’t,” I said. “Can’t foul the murder scene.” Their surprise was noted and I pointed to the body under the drafting table. Jim quickly got busy on his cellphone, while Jack examined the body. I tried to stay out of the way. I had to excuse myself and run up the stairs to the bathroom when Jack lifted the body again to look at the mortal wound. Rankin’s toupée had slipped to one side, adding a dimension something like the unkindest cut of all. By the time I came downstairs, cops of all sizes, shapes and ranks had appeared. I gave my statement to two different officers before I was allowed to leave.