“Yeah, yeah. I see the problem. Let me think. I guess he could fill the tanks with carbon monoxide.”
“Where would he get it?”
“Good point. The cops wouldn’t miss something like that. He could send him down in a tank that was nearly empty.”
“How can you tell the difference between a full and an empty tank?”
“A full tank is a lot heavier than an empty one. Air has weight. A lot of people forget about that.”
“But would you send out an empty tank from the marina?”
“Not on purpose. Or maybe the murderer opens the valve and lets the tank empty as he and his victim head for their dive site.”
“Wouldn’t that hiss? How could the heavy-the villain in my story-hold the tap open?”
“You’re right. It’s a demand valve, so that there’s no leakage from just having the main on/off tap open. Yeah, and an experienced diver would feel the difference in weight. Hey! What about this: your murderer could tamper with the O ring in the regulator.”
“The what?”
“The O ring is a black ring made from neoprene or hard plastic. It balances the intermediate pressure in the regulator. Yeah, you could do it with a screwdriver. You see, there’s a balance chamber in there. It prevents the diver getting air at a pressure that isn’t right for the depth he’s at. O rings wear out like anything else. If the cops looked at it, they might catch it, but again, they might not. It could look like ordinary wear and tear.”
“Does that mean I’ll have to make my murderer a marine engineer?”
“Naw. Anybody who can read a manual could do it. Wouldn’t take long either.”
“Could he do it with others around, say in the boat on the way to a dive?”
“Look, let me show you.” Here Stan gave me a lesson in the fine art of sabotaging a perfectly good aqualung. All in the aid of crime fiction. He was right. It wouldn’t have taken a man like Bob Foley more than a few minutes to “fix” Dermot’s tank. But how could he be sure that Dermot would use it and not one of the others? Stan had an answer for that too. Using the Waome dive as an example, he pointed out that Dermot always rented the same tanks. They were made of an ultralight alloy and not the usual steel. “Your fictional victim could use special tanks too.”
“Yeah!” I agreed. “That would make it easy.”
I promised Stan that I would remember him in the acknowledgements to my next book. Before I drove away, he asked for my autograph. I wrote Sheldon Zatz on the lined paper he held out to me.
“Could you make it ‘to Mike Coward,’ Mr. Zatz?”
“I thought your name was Stan?”
“It is. I was thinking of giving it to a friend. Is that okay?”
“Sure.”
“And didn’t you say your name was Cooperman?”
“That’s right. But I write my books using a pseudonym, a nom de plume. Got it?”
* * *
A charming waitress in a long skirt, obviously a student enjoying a working vacation in Muskoka, cleared away the wreckage of a dinner of ribs of beef and Yorkshire pudding from our table and carried it from the dimly lit patio and into the main building of the Inn at the Falls. We had been talking about all sorts of things, Peggy, Hamp and I. Hamp described his expedition to the Queen Elizabeth Islands to dive through the Arctic polar ice cap. “We were supposed to be testing winter equipment for the army,” he said, “but that didn’t stop us from having fun. You may have seen our pictures in National Geographic. It’s an eerie world under the ice, I don’t mind telling you.”
“That was Hamp’s second polar dive, Benny. He went the first time before we were married.”
“Peg, that was off Cape Hooker on Baffin Island the first time. Scarcely within the Arctic Circle. Last year’s trip took us-”
“Not me! I was in Arizona with Nic Cage and Michael Douglas,” corrected Peggy.
“Yes. Of course, dear. Aaron’s Run kept you busy for three months. By ‘we’ I meant ‘the expedition.’ This time we were off the Disraeli Fiord at the top end of Ellesmere Island. We were on the site for nearly a week.” I nodded my interest from time to time, turning my head back and forth. Finally, Hamp forced me to pull up my end of the conversation with an account of some of my cases, beginning with the one in Niagara Falls. When I’d finished with an exaggerated version of a case that took me into the north woods in search of an evangelist who had “disappeared,” I took a sip that emptied my glass of red wine. That was when Hamp outlined the case of an American explorer who died mysteriously in 1871 on a dash for the North Pole.
“It was a badly run show from start to finish. Lots of fights and rows. The leader’s body was exhumed from the permafrost nearly one hundred years later. It was perfectly preserved, of course. The body proved to be full of arsenic. Now there’s a puzzle for your enquiring mind, Ben.”
“In history, everybody was poisoned by arsenic,” I said, remembering something from a few years ago. “Take Napoleon.”
“Yes! A very interesting case!” said Hamp, shortly before Peggy excused herself to walk down to see the falls before the light was gone. That killed it. And about time too. There is something about Napoleon that either turns you on or turns you off. There’s no middle ground. We got up after a few minutes and, at a distance, followed Peggy down the steep and twisting path to the river. On the way, he quizzed me about the investigation. I talked as we walked.
“A vexing case, I’d say,” Hamp said, his hands thrust deeply into his pockets. “A veritable three-pipe problem.”
“Excuse me?” Hamp waved his hand to show that it wasn’t important.
“May I ask who keeps you informed, Hamp?” I was tempted to call him “mister,” since the familiarity, which worked quite well with dinner, had now hardened into the old routine of my being professionally nosey.
“Ted Thornhill is my main source, but there are others too. I’d prefer to keep their names to myself, if you don’t mind. Unless it becomes important later on, I mean.”
“Not at all. Can you tell me how Vanessa Moss came to NTC? She seems to have collected a number of business rivals and, well, enemies since she arrived. I don’t know whether any of them would try to advance himself over her dead body or try to remove her opposition to dividing up her empire.”
“You think that her enemies are that dedicated?”
“Well, at least one of them could be. As you know, someone shot and killed Renata Sartori. She was staying in Vanessa’s house, wearing her dressing gown.”
“Yes, I see. I see. I don’t know quite what to say to you, Benny. I first heard of Vanessa Moss a little over a year ago. She was still with CBC then. Her name came up twice in two separate meetings. Same day. I mentioned this to Ted Thornhill as a curiosity. Nothing more. A few weeks later, I heard from Ted that he was negotiating with the CBC to buy up her remaining contract.”
“I know you’re not kidding.”
“No, I’m not. Ted should have been warned by the eagerness with which the CBC entered into negotiations. I try not to meddle at that level. People learn from their mistakes. Perhaps I’m a teacher at heart. Although what I could teach Ted Thornhill about bad decisions is moot.”
“Why do you keep him on, then?”
“He is just that much better than his nearest rival. I swallow his imperfections. He’ll do until another comes along. People are so ambitious, Benny, they unmask themselves. No eighteenth-century French court official ever got more mail from the colonies than I get from ambitious time-servers at NTC. I hear about their rivals’ stupidity, their duplicity, their petty dishonesties, their ignorance. Oh, don’t get me started. I am sometimes forced to promote liars and swindlers to high positions, Benny, simply because the alternatives are even more disastrous. I’ll leave you to imagine the rest.”