The Reluctant Detective

by Finley Martin

  “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.” Anne spoke slowly, clearly and deliberately so as not to betray the jitters that she felt, but she was certain that one of them would notice the tremble in her hands, and that would give her away.

  “Think about your daughter. What’s going to happen to her if you go to prison? Being a single mom’s a tough job, and I can understand why someone might stretch things a bit… go the extra mile for their child… not really meaning to break the law… and if you give us a chance, we can make things right. But you have to trust us.”

  “I said… I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Anne had been facing Constable Doiron for the entire interview. Constable Timmons sat across the table from her, but had said nothing and done nothing but stare at the side of her face. Constable Doiron caught his eye. She shrugged and tilted her head to one side as if to say, I tried but it’s not working.

  At Doiron’s shrug, Timmons stood suddenly, his chair tipping and crashing to the floor. Anne, startled, half-turned and shrank back from him as he leaned far across the table toward her.

  “Enough! We’ve had enough of your lying. This is the end of the road for you, Brown. We’ve seized the money you deposited. Your signature is on the deposit slip. The only thing left is what the Crown Prosecutor wants to nail you on. Pick a card: fraud, money-laundering, counterfeiting, uttering counterfeit currency, conspiracy. Explain your involvement in this operation or you won’t be out of jail before your grandchildren are christened.”

  At the word “counterfeit” Anne’s jaw dropped. She could feel colour drain from her face. For a few moments Anne processed what Constable Timmons had shouted into her ear. Gradually, she realized that they knew nothing of her adventures the night before with Sean McGee and Cutter. They knew nothing about the shooting or the fire. They knew nothing about Carson’s thieving or his abduction. They knew nothing at all.

  Suddenly everything became clear. Anne breathed deeply. Then she said, “Why didn’t you tell me what this was all about in the first place? Of course, I’ll cooperate. But bear in mind, though, I’ve got a business to run. I’m not hanging around here all day.”

  Anne’s interrogation lasted another half-hour. She told them everything they already knew about the bank deposit in language as plain and unadorned as she could make it: a client, whom she believed had a business arrangement with her dead uncle, arranged for her to exchange money for unknown merchandise which was being ransomed. According to the law as she knew it, all of this was legal and acceptable practice for security officers and private investigators. She’d followed written instructions for the drop. Then she’d deposited five grand into her business account. The five thousand was her fee. She told them that was all she knew.

  “Where are the instructions?” Constable Doiron wanted to know.

  “I believe they’re still at my office. They could be in my car.”

  “We’ll need those,” said Timmons.

  “I’ll bring them in.”

  “Constable Doiron will go with you and pick them up,” said Timmons.

  “Did you know that the money was counterfeit?” piped in Agent Franklin Pierce.

  “Not at all,” said Anne.

  “How do you account for the fact that only two thousand of the five was counterfeit?”

  Anne thought for a minute. Then it occurred to her. “After I opened the suitcase and walked toward the safe, I tripped on something… stumbled. The suitcase dropped. Some of the bundles fell out, broke apart. My five grand was in the pile. I didn’t think it made any difference which bills I took. Looking back, I expect he intended to pay me with the real money, but they got mixed with a few phoney ones. That’s my guess.”

  “And you’ve had no contact with him since… and you’ve no idea where he is now?”

  “No idea,’ she lied. “So what about my three thousand dollars? At least the real money was mine by rights. When do I get that back?”

  “Probably never. It was part of an illegal activity. The entire deposit was seized and will be kept in evidence,” Timmons snapped.

  Anne’s lips tightened and she held back what she really wanted to say.

  “It is possible… though it may take time,” admitted Doiron in an effort to soften Timmons’s remark.

  “If you’re cleared,” Timmons added. “Maybe your story will hold up, maybe it won’t. You’re still a person of interest to us.”

  “Right now, I’m losing interest in you. I’m done here. I’ve cooperated. Now I’m leaving… unless you want to charge me.” She looked around at each of them. “I didn’t think so.”

  Constable Doiron accompanied her to the door and to the patrol car that had brought Anne to the police station. Anne sat in the front this time as they rode back to her office to retrieve the Client’s instructions. They didn’t speak for most of the trip across town. Then Anne asked, “I only made that deposit the day before yesterday. Isn’t that awfully quick off the mark to make it as counterfeit?”

  “Luck. That’s how a lot of crooks get caught. Our tip came from a guy who worked once upon a time at an international monetary clearing house in Toronto. He was an expert at spotting counterfeit. He retired, moved here, had too much time on his hands, and got part-time work at a local branch bank. Your bank, as it happens, and you know the rest. Luck.”

  Anne nodded thoughtfully.

  “What I don’t understand is what the Secret Service’s interest is? Don’t they just guard the president?”

  “They’re under the US Treasury Department. Counterfeiting is one of their responsibilities, too. Agent Pierce, he’s attached to the US embassy in Ottawa. That’s his connection to the case.”

  “The poor man must be bored to distraction with that assignment.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I would guess that bogus currency would take weeks to percolate through the money tree before anyone picked up on it… let alone did anything about it… but in this case I make a morning deposit, the local teller spots it, he tells the manager, the manager phones Toronto, the Toronto office calls the RCMP, the RCMP calls the US embassy, and that night Franklin Pierce G-man is on the red-eye to Prince Edward Island to hunt me down. What put the fuel to that fire?”

  Anne looked over at Sylvie Doiron and waited for her reply. Sylvie’s eyes scanned the traffic. She said nothing. The car intersected Grafton at Queen and turned left onto Victoria Row.

  “So… what do you think, Sylvie?”

  “I think we’re here,” she said and pulled the car to the curb. “Let’s get that paper. I’ve got a stack of paperwork to process.”

  28

  It wasn’t until Constable Doiron took the Client’s instruction sheet and drove away that Anne felt the anger inside her begin to build. She had been suckered by the Client twice. What a fool she had been. She fell for his sob story, his empathy, his repentance, and now she was jammed up with the RCMP, and, in spite of her release, they were still in a position to make her life even more miserable than it already was, though she couldn’t imagine how it could become much worse.

  Almost nothing in the bank, over a million bucks of phoney money in the safe. Two unresolved cases. A daughter in exile. Two pissed-off outlaw bikers lurking in the wings. Oh yes, and then there’s Patty Pacquet, her new landlady, likely perched like a redheaded vulture on the stone cornice of the roof over her head. Patty wanted her out of the building. Anne had decided to stay.

  Maybe I should see how the ball’s rolling down that lane.

  She picked up the phone. Dick Clements, her lawyer, answered.

  “Dick. Anne Brown here. Listen, a couple days ago Patty Pacquet told me to vacate my offices by the end of this month. She’s my landlady now, so she tells me.”

  “She can’t do that!”

  “I believe you. She can’t. Acco
rding the merry widow, new tenants are moving in the first of July.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. I’ll hand-deliver a cease and desist letter to her lawyer this morning. I’m having lunch with him. In fact, I’ll give it to him for dessert.”

  “Thanks.”

  “By the way, what pastry always leaves a bad taste in a client’s mouth.”

  “I give up, what?”

  “A cinnamon tort,” Dick said. She heard him giggling to himself.

  “Did you just make that up?”

  “Yeah, pretty good, huh?”

  “Don’t bill me for that joke, Dick. Okay?”

  Anne hung up the phone. That’s one kick in the ass to be delivered, she thought.

  Then she dug her hand into her pocket and pulled out the sealed envelope that she had picked up on her doorstep when Constable Timmons had first appeared. She opened it. A short typewritten note fell out. It read: Bring valise to the Confederation Centre of the Arts tomorrow at eleven-thirty. Sit at a booth reserved in your name at Mavor’s Bistro. Leave valise under the table. At twelve o’clock go to the washroom. Stay five minutes. Then leave.

  One more ass-kick to go, she thought.

  Anne had no intention of delivering counterfeit money. If the police had her under surveillance, which was probable, then hauling a valise one block from her office to the Confederation Centre for lunch would look suspicious. If she were busted after she agreed to cooperate, then it would be prison for sure. On the other hand, if she didn’t make the drop, then she’d worry what the Client might do. She knew that he was manipulative. She had learned that he was ruthless. It wouldn’t be a stretch to believe that he was dangerous as well. If she stood between him and his objective, he’d try to break her, and that would be easy. A threat against Jacqui would be plenty of leverage. If not, he was clever enough to find out where her daughter was. Perhaps he already knew.

  Anne wanted to pick up the phone and call her, but she resisted the impulse. It was too soon. Both of them would be awash in tears if she called. Jacqui needed to settle in with Delia McKay. It was generous of Delia to take Jacqui into her home on such little notice. But she was too old to look after a teenager, even one as agreeable as Jacqui. And what could Delia do to amuse Jacqui in the middle of Iona? A thousand acres of rolling hills covered with barley and rye, alfalfa and clover. Strawberry fields and grazing cattle. Whiskered farmers, sun-burnt, squinty eyed. Their women sitting on porches in shapeless, wind-blown dresses, paring potatoes and husking corn. Jacqui will feel lost amongst all that. Abandoned.

  Anne imagined her daughter retreating to her room and burying herself in a dusty book retrieved from a trunk of other dusty books. She imagined her staring out the farmhouse window at empty undulating grain fields and wondering what she had done to deserve this solitude.

  Worrying about Jacqui wasn’t solving her problem, though. Neither was the runaway logic of anger. Dick Clements’s bad joke had helped there. It was so pathetic that it almost seemed funny. Anyway, it broke her mood, and that brought her boiling pot of revenge down to a studied simmer. It was time to snap out of it and get the job done, even if she earned nothing for her labours. If there’s any justice at all, she thought, at least she might sample the sweet taste of retribution.

  She had a plan in mind.

  29

  Anne walked through Dit’s display room door. The sign above it read: “Malone Security Systems” and below it in smaller lettering, “Custom Electronics for Law Enforcement.” A soft bell tone drew Urban Nolan’s eyes from the register behind the counter. The large frames on his glasses seemed to weigh down his head. He half-looked up, raised his pudgy hand in a half-wave, and mouthed an inaudible number as he counted transistors in a small tray.

  Anne returned his half-wave and added a half-smile. Then she pushed through the swing door into the workshop. “Hello, Eli,” she said to an elfish man on a high stool in the corner. His back was to her, and he viewed her through the surveillance camera above his head. A small soldering iron dangled from his hand. A thin, wavering line of smoke rose above his head, and a faint smell of flux carried across the room. Eli didn’t speak. He rarely spoke to Dit or Urban and, when he did, it was in hushed tones and mumblings scarcely audible above the buzz of the neon lights, and he never spoke to Anne. But she greeted him whenever she came into the shop, and she felt good about the small embarrassed wrinkle of a smile he gave her sometimes in return.

  Urban Nolan and Eli Seares were electronic savants whom Dit had discovered in most unlikely places and encouraged to come to work with him. Collectively, Anne thought of them as the Geek Squad, though she never would have said so. She was never sure whether it would hurt their feelings or be carried as a badge of pride. With Dit, however, she had no such reservations, referring to him privately as Der Geekmeister von Stratford Stadt or the Geek Whisperer.

  “Whaddya need?” Dit asked. He was bent over a worktable, a magnifying loupe in one eye, a tiny screwdriver between two fingers. He was examining an integrated circuit. The screwdriver traced its path. He grunted as if to affirm some hypothesis. Then he looked up at Anne. “So what can I do for ya?” he asked brightly.

  “You’re in a good mood,” she said with surprise.

  “Why shouldn’t I be? It’s a beautiful day on Prince Edward Island. I’m the very picture of health. The boys here are working at a blistering pace. My surveillance gizmos are leaving the shipping dock quicker than industrial secrets can make it to Beijing. And Wondergirl lives to fight another good fight.”

  “Whaddya mean by that?” she asked, a heavy coat of suspicion dripping from her words.

  “You know what I mean by that.”

  “Remind me. The memory of it all escapes me,” said Anne.

  “It begins with you getting beaten by a mutt named Sean McGee. It ends with a gunfight at the OK corral.” The humour in his voice evaporated when he began to speak. His lips tightened, and his jaw had clenched by the time he finished.

  “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t think that Tim Perkins had such a big mouth.”

  “That’s why I recommended him. He’s a good friend. He tells me everything.”

  “How’d he find out about the Hole in the Wall?”

  “He didn’t. I have friends in low places, too.”

  “A girl just can’t keep any secrets around here, can she?”

  “This really isn’t funny, Anne. You could have been killed.”

  “Okay. I know, I know,” she replied, suddenly becoming staid and almost apologetic. “But I didn’t. Things got complicated and I’ve worked my way through them.”

  “What happened to your hostage?”

  Anne looked puzzled. Then she said: “He wasn’t a hostage. He was a dumb kid who stepped deeper into it than he could wade. I liberated him, so to speak, and put him on a bus to Tignish. He’s gonna spend some time visiting a cousin there until his parents grow up and his old friends die of unnatural causes. Look, can we go somewhere and talk? I might as well fill you in on the whole story. You’re going to nickel and dime it out of me anyway.”

  “Did you drive over or jog?”

  “I walked.”

  “Then we’ll take my rig. Hop in.”

  Dit’s rig was a late-model autumn blue Chrysler parked in front of his store. He wheeled himself outside and pushed a button on his key chain. The sliding door of the van rolled open, the suspension lowered, and a ramp extended itself down to the pavement. Dit rolled his chair up the ramp and into the empty spot behind the driver’s wheel. Another button locked the wheelchair to a plate on the floor, the ramp receded, the suspension rose, and the sliding door closed behind him.

  The coffee shop was across town at the Island Mall. The noon diners had returned to their offices and shops. That left three old women sipping tea and nibbling scones, and a young couple at a corner table staring he
lplessly at their sobbing two-year-old. Dit and Anne had the rest of the place to themselves.

  Anne poked at her food and finished two cups of black coffee. By then she had gotten through most of her account of the last few days. Dit had already learned most of it from piecing together gossip he’d heard with facts he’d gathered. His eyebrows raised, however, when Anne told him that the money was counterfeit, that the police had hauled her in for questioning, and that she had to make a delivery which could land her in prison.

  “… but I have a plan,” she concluded proudly, “and that’s where you come in… that is, if you want to… of course, there’s no pressure… you’ve got a business to look after… it really isn’t your concern… I could handle it with no problem… by myself… in fact, I…”

  “For god’s sake, of course I’ll help. So stop jabbering, and tell me what you have in mind.”

  Anne took a deep breath before she began.

  “I’m going to stash the counterfeit money in my safe and fill the empty valise with stacks of magazines instead. I’ll make the drop as planned. He probably won’t check the contents in public. This is where you come in… hopefully. You could put a satellite tracking device in the valise and we could follow it to its destination. Eventually the trail will lead to the Client. I’ll inform the police. They’ll pick him up. I’ll give them the counterfeit, and then I’m free and clear.” Looking rather pleased with her plan, Anne leaned back in her chair. Her eyes brightened and fixed on Dit to gauge his reaction. His eyes stared thoughtfully down at the arms folded across his chest. The muscles of his jaw twitched as if he were chewing through the details of her plan. Anne had expected a quick positive response, but Dit didn’t provide one. Anne grew impatient. Then annoyed.

  “Hello.” Her knuckles rapped the table. “Hello. Anyone home in Malone-land?”

  Dit looked up unabashed. “What about that outlaw biker pack? Satan’s Chosen.”

  “About that I can’t say. Right now, though, I’m more worried about the devil I don’t know.”