The Cooperman Variation

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I should have seen the writing on the wall. It was writ large, as my friend Dr. Frank Bushmill says. “You have to pay attention to the signs and portents, Benny,” he says, and he should know. Frank has remade his life a couple of times based on his reading of the signs. How he rejected his well-to-do family, abandoned a promising career at Trinity College, cleared out of Dublin and came to live here is a history of a man who won’t take “yes” for an answer.

The first sign, which I ignored, was the closing of the United Cigar Store, which cut me off from my usual lunch counter. Then the other places along St. Andrew and James streets, the Columbia and the Crystal, where I used to go for coffee and meals, went out of business or changed beyond recognition. Then the thunderbolt: a few weeks ago the Diana Sweets went broke. Not only did the Di close for business, but one night some enterprising wiseguy with a truck took all the tables, booths and mirrored cherrywood walls off to some location across the Niagara River. Here, the Di will be recreated for trendy diners in the great Empire State of New York as an evocation of the 1930s. A couple of irate citizens asked me to try to trace the Di, but even with all my experience as a private investigator I never had much luck in tracing people, let alone restaurant interiors.

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